International Encyclopedia of the SOCIAL SCIENCES
\ssociate Editors Heinz Eulau, Political Science Lloyd A. Fallers, Anthropology William H. Kruskal, Statistics Gardner Lindzey, Psychology Albert Rees, Economics Albert J. Reiss, Jr., Sociology Edward Shils, Social Thought
Special Editors Elinor G. Barber, Biographies John G. Barley, Applied Psychology Bert F. Hoselitz, Economic Development Clifford T. Morgan, Experimental Psychology Robert H. Strotz, Econometrics
Editorial Staff Marjorie A. Bassett, Economics P. G. Bock, Political Science Robert M. Coen, Econometrics J. M. B. Edwards, Sociology David S. Gochman, Psychology George Lowy, Bibliographies Judith M. Tanur, Statistics Judith M. Treistman, Anthropology
Alvin Johnson HONORARY EDITOR
W. Allen Wallis CHAIRMAN, EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD
International Encyclopedia of the SOCIAL SCIENCES DAVID L. S I L L S EDITOR
VOLUME
The Macmillan Company & The Free Press
16
COPYRIGHT © iges BY CROWELL COLLIER AND MACMILLAN, INC.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS BOOK MAY BE REPRODUCED OR TRANSMITTED IN ANY FORM OR BY ANY MEANS, ELECTRONIC OR MECHANICAL, INCLUDING PHOTOCOPYING, RECORDING, OR BY ANY INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL SYSTEM, WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM CROWELL COLLIER AND MACMILLAN, INC.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG NUMBER 68-10023
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
International Encyclopedia of the SOCIAL SCIENCES
[ C O N T I N U E D ]
THOMAS, W. I. William Isaac Thomas (1863-1947), American sociologist and social psychologist, was born in Virginia. Little is known about his early years, but he entered the University of Tennessee at the age of 17 and graduated in 1884. He remained at the university for the next four years as an instructor in modern and classical languages, thereby acquiring a linguistic facility that was to prove invaluable in his later work. After marrying Harriet Park in 1888, he spent a year studying in Germany and then joined the faculty of Oberlin College, where he taught English. In 1893, while on leave from Oberlin, he began graduate work in sociology at the University of Chicago and received his doctorate in 1896. Between 1896 and 1910, when he attained his professorship at the University of Chicago, Thomas published a series of papers on the social psychology of sex (1907) and prepared the Source Book for Social Origins (1909). These early writings reveal an orderly and scholarly mind, a lucid, unpretentious prose style, a grasp of varied but relevant literature, and a flair for interpreting human phenomena. They also contain, in embryonic form, several ideas more fully developed in later works, e.g., the role of attitudes, the "four wishes," the importance of social science, and the interplay of biological and sociocultural factors in human behavior. (These are reviewed in detail in Young 1963.) Between 1908 and 1918 Thomas traveled extensively in Europe, with the support of the Helen Culver Fund for Race Psychology, and began to collect materials on Polish society and the migration of the peasants to America. In 1914 he began
his collaboration with Florian Znaniecki, which culminated in the monumental The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918-1920). This was not merely a monograph on a particular cultural and political group but a work that contained important theoretical and methodological insights. Included in it were the "Methodological Note"; a lengthy, intensive life history; theories of personality development and of social change; a typology of personalities; an analysis of the salient features of social organization; and the central attitudevalue schema. Nearly twenty years later it was selected as one of the most significant volumes in social science and was subjected to a searching reappraisal (see Blumer 1939). During this period Thomas also kept abreast of ideas in a variety of fields, from the newer biology of Jacques Loeb, H. S. Jennings, C. M. Child, and A. J. Carlson to the psychology of Pavlov and J. B. Watson and the psychiatry of Freud, Adolf Meyer, and Harry Stack Sullivan. This intense curiosity about ideas provided a rich intellectual background against which his own creativity could flourish. In 1918, as a result of a newspaper scandal, Thomas' appointment at the University of Chicago was terminated, and thereafter his only academic appointments were at the New School for Social Research, from 1923 to 1928, and at Harvard University, in 1936/1937. His later career was maintained through independent research and writing that was often supported by interested individuals, private foundations, or other agencies. With the assistance of Mrs. W. F. Dummer, a Chicago philanthropist, he completed The Unadjusted Girl (1923) and organized an important symposium, later published as The Unconscious (1928). He was in fact the author of Old World 1
2
THOMAS, W. I.
Traits Transplanted (1921), a volume in the Americanization Studies series, supported by the Carnegie Corporation. The Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial supported his work, with Dorothy S. Thomas, on approaches to the behavior problems of children, in The Child in America (1928). As president of the American Sociological Society in 1927, he delivered the address "The Behavior Pattern and the Situation" (1927). In succeeding years he was on the staff of the Social Science Research Council, preparing a lengthy memorandum on research problems in the field of culture and personality (published for the first time in 1951, part 4). In connection with this work he again traveled extensively in Scandinavia and elsewhere in Europe, reviewing research on crime, personality formation, and population trends. His first marriage ended in divorce in 1934. His second wife, Dorothy S. Thomas, whom he married in 1935, is an eminent sociologist in her own right and in 1952 was also president of the American Sociological Society. Thomas' last book, Primitive Behavior: An Introduction to the Social Sciences, was published in 1937, and a year later he took part in a symposium that reviewed the significance of The Polish Peasant (see Blumer 1939). After spending a few years in New Haven, Connecticut, he moved to Berkeley, California, where he died at the age of 84. In private life Thomas was an urbane, genial, and witty cosmopolitan. He savored good food, good wine, and good companionship. He had a zest for life, an enormous curiosity about all human experience^ and a generous capacity for warmth and friendship. Few men have worn the mantle of "gentleman and scholar" so gracefully. During the more than forty years of his active career, Thomas was author, coauthor, or editor of 7 books and 38 articles, all marked by erudition, imagination, and seminal ideas. Yet he had no formal doctrine or sociological system, nor did he found a school of sociology. Rather, he directed his attention to a variety of empirical areas— including sex differences, migration, delinquency, and social organization—and fashioned methods and concepts that seemed appropriate to the subject at hand. Nevertheless, certain central themes appear and reappear in a number of his works, and together they constitute his essential contributions to the development of social science. Social behavior. Thomas' interest in human behavior began with his first publications on the sources and consequences of sex differences. Exploring such subjects as modesty, feminine character, and the sex division of labor, he utilized
both biological and sociocultural data, a technique he was to use often. Although he viewed the behavioral differences between the sexes as a function of both internal (organic) and external (sociocultural) conditions, he followed the practice of his time by giving some primacy to the organic factors. That is, he had some tendency toward "reductionism," but he was not consistent, as the development of the "four wishes" and the situational approach to behavior indicates. The four wishes were first presented in the paper "The Persistence of Primary-group Norms" (1917). Thomas described them as "interests," connected with the "desires" for new experience, for mastery, for recognition, and for safety or security. While he did not indicate clearly the precise place of these wishes in the spectrum of motivation, he derived them from "original emotional reactions," such as fear, rage, and love. Further, he suggested the primacy of biology by the statement that all forms of behavior can ultimately be reduced to two fundamental appetites, food hunger and sex hunger. In The Polish Peasant, the wishes became in effect synonymous with attitudes and were defined as partly biological and partly social in character. Two of them—the desires for mastery and security —are linked respectively with the "instincts" of hate and fear, but the desires for new experience and for recognition are free of such organic anchorage. Further, Thomas altered the theoretical significance of the wishes: their rationale now is social control rather than reductionism. Society, through suitable appeals to the wishes as well as by punishments and rewards relating to their expression, can achieve effective social control because it is the essence of the wishes that they must be satisfied socially. The final formulation of the wishes appeared in The Unadjusted Girl, in which Thomas used them to analyze and interpret various forms of female delinquency. Now, however, he dropped the wish for "mastery," replacing it by the wish for "response," which is based on the instinct of love. In this version, the wishes for new experience and for security are linked respectively to the instincts of anger and fear; only the wish for recognition appears to be derived completely from social experience. In this work Thomas referred to the wishes as being "forces which impel to action" and as corresponding in general to the "nervous mechanism." The wishes, in one form or another, became extremely popular in American sociology; their very simplicity and versatility made them attrac-
THOMAS, W. I. This was Thomas' vision in "The Persistence of Primary-group Norms" (1917) and in the famous "Methodological Note" of The Polish Peasant (1918-1920). Clearly, Thomas' view was similar to the one developed by Emile Durkheim some twenty years earlier, for Durkheim was also concerned with problems of social integration and the development of a sociological science. The "social facts" which were the subject matter of Durkheim's social science did not, however, include individual consciousness or subjective states, "facts" that Thomas considered to be of great importance. Thus, in The Polish Peasant, the "attitude-value" schema was introduced precisely for the purpose of studying the relationship between objective and subjective factors. The concept of a "value" in the schema is very similar to Durkheim's concept of a "social fact" in that it is an objective datum. It is also similar to Thomas' earlier concept of "control" in the sense that it is an object of activity. An "attitude" is a motivational element in individual consciousness, such as one of the postulated four wishes. Thus, Thomas regarded social theory and social science as primarily concerned with the interactions and combinations of social values with individual attitudes, because the "cause" of a social or individual phenomenon is never one of these alone but always a joint product. The intent here was to limit, at least abstractly, the number and kind of phenomena with which social science must deal, in order to increase the possibility of formulating a limited number of sociological laws. Indeed, the laws of "social becoming" can be discovered only by studying the interaction of values and attitudes as it has occurred through time in various societies. The schema implied an endless series of empirical studies because the number of possible social values and individual attitudes is almost infinite; but such research would presumably result in a limited number of highly abstract laws, a conception that was clearly based upon the model of the more successful physical sciences of the time. In addition, since the greatest strides in these sciences had been made by men who were moved more by theoretical concerns than by the practical problems of the moment, such theoretical concerns should be primary for social scientists. In Thomas' view, the major weakness of social science was that it lacked theory rooted firmly in systematic data: there was too much aimless empiricism on the one hand and grand conceptualizing on the other, with little relationship between them. Social scientists had to develop methods of investigation compara-
5
ble to those of the natural sciences, linking concepts and hypotheses with measurable systematic observations and eliminating their reference to a particular social "problem." The attitude-value schema is now generally regarded as being oversimplified. Nevertheless, it was important at the time as an illustration of what is involved in theory building and of what social science might become—not only a theoretical science, but also one that in due course might find practical application. In all his writings Thomas never deviated from his insistence that rigorous method lies at the heart of successful science. But some of his related views on social science were not so consistent. For example, in his later years he began to doubt that social science can discover "laws" in the same sense as physics and chemistry, for these sciences deal with relatively few variables; the properties of their phenomena do not change; and they can operate within closed systems. In social science, on the other hand, the variables are many; the properties of its phenomena (people) do change; and the systems of personality, society, and culture are open-ended. Thus he came to speak of probabilities and inferences rather than laws and at one point remarked that he did not believe in comparisons between physics and sociology. (For the evolution of Thomas' ideas regarding science and method, see 1951, part 1.) In his later works Thomas emphasized the advantages to social science that might result from taking a situational approach to behavior: "Individuals differentiated in what ways placed in what situations react in what patterns of behavior, and what behavioral changes follow what changes in situation?" (1951, p. 18). The task of the scientist is to describe the situation as accurately as possible in either experimental or field studies and then to observe the behavior in the situation of persons with specified characteristics. In this way systematic inferences can be drawn regarding the crucial variables intervening between stimulus and response. The use of control groups in research will also be facilitated. Many of these ideas regarding social science and social research are now so firmly held and practiced that they are commonplace. But in the years between the two great wars, they required a spokesman, an advocate, and a demonstrator— roles that Thomas filled with distinction. In several ways Thomas was one of the most influential social scientists of the century. During his years at the University of Chicago he helped
4
THOMAS, W. I.
by habit, but from time to time crises arise in social life, either in the form of completely new situations or of old situations on a different scale. Attention is then directed to alternative patterns and new solutions. Extraordinary individuals, building on existing techniques, become especially important in this process of change through adaptation. During his study of the Polish peasant, Thomas became interested in the different rates of change manifested in different societies and the consequences thereof. In nonliterate and peasant societies, the slowness of the rate of change permits the incorporation of new elements into the existing cultural fabric, thereby preventing any widespread demoralization among the people. In modern society, however, change seems so rapid and complex that traditional social controls are steadily being weakened. Group solidarity is being fragmented, and behavior is becoming individualized. The primary group is being replaced by a differentiated mass society with different and conflicting definitions of situations. To deal with these phenomena, Thomas and Znaniecki presented a new model of social change in The Polish Peasant. As a base line, there is an ideal type of "social organization" in which norms and behavior are generally congruent. In every group there are some deviations, either innovative or destructive, from the norms, but as long as these remain few and scattered, the validity of the norms themselves is not questioned; the group can handle the challenge of deviation through a process of "social reorganization," which is essentially any collective response that reaffirms and reinforces existing norms and values. However, when deviations become frequent and widespread, even reaching the point of rebellion or revolt, the normal process of reorganization is inadequate; "social disorganization" has set in, either through the general acceptance of new norms and values by younger generations or through lack of consensus among adults or through combinations of both. This condition, which reflects a decrease in the influence of social norms, is characteristic of modern complex societies and requires nothing less than "social reconstruction," or the creation of new codes and institutions better adapted to the changed conditions of life. In this process, creative individuals are once again assigned major leadership roles, to be guided perhaps by the fruits of successful social research. Since change appeared to sociologists of Thomas' generation to have gone beyond the point at which such concepts as social organization and reorgan-
ization could be effectively applied and since blueprints for a program of social reconstruction did not exist, sociological attention was focused on social disorganization. The phenomena of divorce, crime, delinquency, and mental illness were all studied intensively, and courses in social disorganization became standard offerings in most American colleges and universities. All too often, however, attention was concentrated on the phenotypic elements, and the underlying genotypic processes of change were ignored. As a result, little progress has been made in recent decades toward more comprehensive theories of deviance or of social disorganization as a phase of massive social change. Thomas' legacy, then, lies in formulating macro concepts of a distinctively sociological theory of change that may still warrant research which leads to more specific indicators and hypotheses. Toward a social science. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the idea of a social science was weak and uncertain. Anthropology was largely dominated by concepts borrowed from biology and archeology; psychology was in its infancy; sociology was largely concerned with amelioration of social "problems" or the creation of vast intellectual systems; social psychology was just beginning to be talked about; and psychiatry was preoccupied with nosology and organic approaches to "insanity." The principal science that seemed to offer any clues to understanding man and his behavior was biology and, understandably enough, many persons found it convenient to "reduce" social phenomena to biological terms. Only a few—Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Sumner, and, to some extent, Spencer—had managed to rise above the major presuppositions of the time. It is against such a background that Thomas' contributions to the development of a truly social social science must be viewed. As has been indicated, Thomas thought that the modern world was undergoing such rapid and farflung change that it was becoming disorganized socially. The mutual dependence of the individual and the group that fostered stability in the primary groups of the past was being shattered by forces and pressures that seemed incomprehensible. "Common sense" explanations of the causes and trends of events were proving inadequate, as was the social control technique of "ordering and forbidding." Thus, the great need was for a social science that would study, systematically and empirically, large classes of social events, with the intent of achieving explanatory principles that could then be applied to rational social control.
THOMAS, W. I. This was Thomas' vision in "The Persistence of Primary-group Norms" (1917) and in the famous "Methodological Note" of The Polish Peasant (1918-1920). Clearly, Thomas' view was similar to the one developed by Emile Durkheim some twenty years earlier, for Durkheim was also concerned with problems of social integration and the development of a sociological science. The "social facts" which were the subject matter of Durkheim's social science did not, however, include individual consciousness or subjective states, "facts" that Thomas considered to be of great importance. Thus, in The Polish Peasant, the "attitude-value" schema was introduced precisely for the purpose of studying the relationship between objective and subjective factors. The concept of a "value" in the schema is very similar to Durkheim's concept of a "social fact" in that it is an objective datum. It is also similar to Thomas' earlier concept of "control" in the sense that it is an object of activity. An "attitude" is a motivational element in individual consciousness, such as one of the postulated four wishes. Thus, Thomas regarded social theory and social science as primarily concerned with the interactions and combinations of social values with individual attitudes, because the "cause" of a social or individual phenomenon is never one of these alone but always a joint product. The intent here was to limit, at least abstractly, the number and kind of phenomena with which social science must deal, in order to increase the possibility of formulating a limited number of sociological laws. Indeed, the laws of "social becoming" can be discovered only by studying the interaction of values and attitudes as it has occurred through time in various societies. The schema implied an endless series of empirical studies because the number of possible social values and individual attitudes is almost infinite; but such research would presumably result in a limited number of highly abstract laws, a conception that was clearly based upon the model of the more successful physical sciences of the time. In addition, since the greatest strides in these sciences had been made by men who were moved more by theoretical concerns than by the practical problems of the moment, such theoretical concerns should be primary for social scientists. In Thomas' view, the major weakness of social science was that it lacked theory rooted firmly in systematic data: there was too much aimless empiricism on the one hand and grand conceptualizing on the other, with little relationship between them. Social scientists had to develop methods of investigation compara-
ble to those of the natural sciences, linking concepts and hypotheses with measurable systematic observations and eliminating their reference to a particular social "problem." The attitude-value schema is now generally regarded as being oversimplified. Nevertheless, it was important at the time as an illustration of what is involved in theory building and of what social science might become—not only a theoretical science, but also one that in due course might find practical application. In all his writings Thomas never deviated from his insistence that rigorous method lies at the heart of successful science. But some of his related views on social science were not so consistent. For example, in his later years he began to doubt that social science can discover "laws" in the same sense as physics and chemistry, for these sciences deal with relatively few variables; the properties of their phenomena do not change; and they can operate within closed systems. In social science, on the other hand, the variables are many; the properties of its phenomena (people) do change; and the systems of personality, society, and culture are open-ended. Thus he came to speak of probabilities and inferences rather than laws and at one point remarked that he did not believe in comparisons between physics and sociology. (For the evolution of Thomas' ideas regarding science and method, see 1951, part 1.) In his later works Thomas emphasized the advantages to social science that might result from taking a situational approach to behavior: "Individuals differentiated in what ways placed in what situations react in what patterns of behavior, and what behavioral changes follow what changes in situation?" (1951, p. 18). The task of the scientist is to describe the situation as accurately as possible in either experimental or field studies and then to observe the behavior in the situation of persons with specified characteristics. In this way systematic inferences can be drawn regarding the crucial variables intervening between stimulus and response. The use of control groups in research will also be facilitated. Many of these ideas regarding social science and social research are now so firmly held and practiced that they are commonplace. But in the years between the two great wars, they required a spokesman, an advocate, and a demonstrator— roles that Thomas filled with distinction. In several ways Thomas was one of the most influential social scientists of the century. During his years at the University of Chicago he helped
6
THOMAS AQUINAS, SAINT
to train a. number of young sociologists and social psychologists who, in turn, occupied faculty positions in many universities. Together with his colleagues at Chicago he formed a graduate department which, in terms of quantity and quality of graduate students and scholarly production, dominated American sociology for several decades. He helped to lead sociologists out of the armchair and into the field and the laboratory by establishing the tradition of empirical research for doctoral degrees in sociology. The many concepts he fashioned found their way into textbook after textbook and into the classrooms, thereby influencing generations of younger sociologists. His pioneering memorandum on research in culture and personality influenced the later course of the Social Science Research Council and the work of other scholars in the field. Moreover, he placed social science in the context of modern times, giving due weight to theory and fundamental research but also insisting that the ultimate test of a science must lie in its fruitful application to practical problems. His own keen insights led to a wealth of concepts that not only illuminated specific areas but also possessed more generalized theoretical power. He anticipated and contributed to the formation of a number of current issues in theory and research. His contributions have become a respected part of the culture of modern social science, and we are all, in one way or another, intellectually indebted to him.
(1923) 1964 The Unadjusted Girl: With Cases and Standpoint for Behavior Analysis. Boston: Little. 1927 The Behavior Pattern and the Situation. American Sociological Society, Publications 22:1-13. 1928 The Configurations of Personality. Pages 143-177 in The Unconscious: A Symposium, by C. M. Child et al. New York: Knopf. 1928 THOMAS, W. I.; and THOMAS, DOROTHY S. The Child in America: Behavior Problems and Programs. New York: Knopf. 1937 Primitive Behavior: An Introduction to the Social Sciences. New York: McGraw-Hill. 1951 Social Behavior and Personality: Contributions of W. I. Thomas to Theory and Social Research. Edited by Edmund H. Volkart. New York: Social Science Research Council. On Social Organization and Social Personality: Selected Papers. Edited and with an introduction by Morris Janowitz. Univ. of Chicago Press, 1966. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
BLUMER, HERBERT 1939 An Appraisal of Thomas and Znaniecki's The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. New York: Social Science Research Council. HINKLE, GISELA J. 1952 The "Four Wishes" in Thomas' Theory of Social Change. Social Research 19:464-484. JANOWITZ, MORRIS 1966 Introduction. In W. I. Thomas, W. I. Thomas on Social Organization and Social Personality. Univ. of Chicago Press. VOLKART, E. H. 1953 Aspects of the Theories of W. I. Thomas. Social Research 20:345-357. YOUNG, KIMBALL 1963 The Contribution of William Isaac Thomas to Sociology. Unpublished manuscript. -> Distributed by Student Book Exchange, 1737 Sherman Ave., Evanston, 111.
THOMAS AQUINAS, SAINT See AQUINAS, THOMAS.
E. H. VOLKART [For the historical context of Thomas' work, see the biographies of COOLEY; DURKHEIM; PARK; SUMNER; ZNANIECKI. For discussion of the subsequent development of his ideas, see CREATIVITY, article on SOCIAL ASPECTS; DEVIANT BEHAVIOR; OBSERVATION;
VALUES.] WORKS BY THOMAS 1907
Sex and Society: Studies in the Social Psychology of Sex. Univ. of Chicago Press. (1909) 1920 Source Book for Social Origins: Ethnological Materials, Psychological Standpoint, Classified and Annotated Bibliographies for the Interpretation of Savage Society. 6th ed. Boston: Badger. 1917 The Persistence of Primary-group Norms in Presentday Society and Their Influence in Our Educational System. Pages 159-197 in Suggestions of Modern Science Concerning Education, by Herbert S. Jennings et al. New York: Macmillan. (1918-1920) 1958 THOMAS, W. I.; and ZNANIECKI, FLORIAN The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. 2 vols. 2d ed. New York: Dover. 1921 Old World Traits Transplanted, by Robert E. Park and Herbert A. Miller. New York: Harper. -> Circumstances made it impossible for this work to be published under Thomas' name.
THOMPSON, WILLIAM William Thompson (1775-1833), a British socialist, was born in Cork, Ireland, but exercised his greatest political influence in England, where industrial development was raising new economic and social problems. The most powerful influence on his early writings was Bentham, from whom he derived his underlying utilitarian philosophy. Bentham, he wrote, "had done more for moral science than Bacon did for physical science" by exposing the fallacies of traditional social and political arguments and by relating the actions of both individuals and governments to the principle of "the greatest happiness of the greatest number" ([1824] 1963, p. x). The influence of Bentham shaped Thompson's earliest, biggest, and most important book, An Inquiry Into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth (1824). Thompson's view of economics, however, diverged sharply from that of Bentham even at this early stage. Thompson was
THOMPSON, WILLIAM preoccupied with the problem of distribution. He drew a contrast between unequal distribution, under a system of competitive capitalist production, and fair distribution according to labor performed, under a system of cooperative production. He coined many interesting phrases (such as "misery in the midst of all the means of happiness") and touched on a number of original questions of theory (for example, diminishing utility). He saw the problems of economics as the problems of a "system" and incorporated in his analysis an account not only of "social motives" and incentives but of the relationship between cooperative distribution and production. A second influence on the Inquiry was Robert Owen, who in turn greatly admired Thompson's work. In the later 1820s, indeed, Thompson became the most powerful Owenite theoretician, drawing Owen himself into socialist argument and workingclass politics. Labour Rewarded (1827), a reply to Thomas Hodgskin's Labour Defended (1825), is specifically Owenite in tone, strongly advocating the creation both of cooperative societies and trade unions. Thompson distrusted the coercive power of the state, fully accepted Owen's program of community living, and in 1830 published detailed plans with the title Practical Directions for the Establishment of Communities. Yet Thompson's analysis had more depth than Owen's, for it passed from the mechanics of community building to a survey of broad trends in social history, an evaluation of rival contemporary philosophies, including utilitarianism and socialism, and a prediction of the shape of the future. He emphasized the facts of "exploitation," and he anticipated Marx by his use of the term "surplus value" and by his "realistic" approach to problems of class. He held, following James Mill, that public opinion in the past was "the opinion of the influential classes of society." The rich, "like all other classes in every community," must "obey the influence of the peculiar circumstances in which they are placed" ([1824] 1963, p. 211). "The Industrious Classes," however, were "learning their own importance" and would "soon speak out" (1827, pp. 40-41). This was a fair statement of the position in Britain at that time, and Thompson did much to stimulate working-class initiative. He was present at the Co-operative congresses of 1831 and 1832, advocated the appointment of "Cooperative missionaries" on Saint-Simonian and (later) Chartist lines to spread the gospel, and bequeathed his Irish estate to the Co-operative movement. He recognized the importance of agitation
7
and propaganda among productive laborers as well as "mental labourers, literati and men of science." He accused Hodgskin of paying too much attention to the latter and quarreled with Owen in 1832 about the paternalist and autocratic elements in Owen's own plans. In his opposition to Owen he was supported by a majority of Co-operative delegates at the third congress of 1832 (see Co-operative Congress 1832). Although legal difficulties eventually prevented the Co-operators from securing his estate, his intellectual legacy was greatly treasured. The revival of interest in early socialist doctrines in the late nineteenth century led H. S. Foxwell and Anton Menger to proclaim Thompson as "the most eminent founder of scientific Socialism" from whom "the later socialists, the Saint-Simonians, Proudhon, and above all, Marx and Rodbertus, have directly or indirectly drawn their opinions" (Menger [1886] 1962, p. 51). One other aspect of Thompson's thought which has historical interest is his passionate championing of the rights of women. His Appeal of One Half the Human Race (1825) has an important place in the literature of female emancipation. ASA BRIGGS [For the historical context of Thompson's work, see the biographies of BENTHAM and OWEN; for discussion of the subsequent development of his ideas, sec ECONOMIC THOUGHT, article on SOCIALIST THOUGHT; and the biographies of MARX; PROUDHON; RODBERTUS.] WORKS BY THOMPSON (1824) 1963 An Inquiry Into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth Most Conducive to Human Happiness. New York: Kelley. 1825 Appeal of One Half the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to Retain Them in Political and Thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery. London: Longmans. 1827 Labour Rewarded: The Claims of Labour and Capital Conciliated; Or, How to Secure to Labour the Whole Products of Its Exertions. London: Hunt & Clarke. 1830 Practical Directions for the Establishment of Communities. London: Strange. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY CO-OPERATIVE CONGRESS, THIRD, LONDON, 1832 1832 Proceedings. London: Strange. HODGSKIN, THOMAS (1825) 1922 Labour Defended Against the Claims of Capital. London: Labour Pub. MENGER, ANTON (1886) 1962 Right to the Whole Produce of Labour: The Origin and Development of the Theory of Labour's Claim to the Whole Product of Industry. New York: Kelley. -> First published as Das Recht auf den vollen Arbeitsertrag. PANKHURST, RICHARD K. P. 1954 William Thompson: Britain's Pioneer Socialist, Feminist, and Co-operator. London: Watts.
8
THORNDIKE, EDWARD L. THORNDIKE, EDWARD L.
Edward Lee Thorndike (1874-1949) has been rightly called America's most productive psychologist. He was an indefatigable researcher with wide interests. As important as his capacity for work was his responsiveness to the intellectual and social currents generated by contemporary scientific and technological developments. He once described his career as "a conglomerate amassed under the pressure of varied opportunities and demands," and he doubted whether being faithful to one's own plans made science as rich as did following the world's plans for the scientist. Showing great imaginative and creative powers while living this credo, Thorndike so much determined the character of the whole of modern American psychology that his contribution is largely taken for granted. Historical background. "It is certain that man should try to match his understanding of masses, atoms, and cells by understanding of himself," Thorndike wrote in Human Nature and the Social Order (1940, p. 97). These words express the sentiment that had ordered not only his career but those of his fellow builders of a science of man since the dawn of the Darwinian age. Just as Bacon, Locke, and Newton had invigorated and redirected the physical sciences, so empiricism and theory building in the biological and social sciences flourished after the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859. The doctrine of evolution made man an objective, physical fact in a natural world. The interplay of organism and environment became something to be examined. The biological and psychological processes of the lower animals became relevant to the understanding of man. Interest in the differences between species and in the theory of natural selection generated a curiosity about intraspecies variation; the study and measurement of individual differences grew into a major enterprise of the "new psychology," especially in the United States. In sum, psychology became "genetic." It was feared by some that in the process of becoming genetic, the various social sciences would threaten the existing social order. Others, however, heralded the new sciences of man, modeled as they were upon the spirit and methods of the physical sciences, as basic to a future "social engineering." They hoped the new sciences would make social problems amenable to solution and would enrich social life, just as the older physical sciences had produced technological and material progress. To become scientific, however, psychology had to do more than view human nature and institutions as part of a continuum connecting all organic
life; it had to renounce armchair theorizing and introspection, develop a new methodology, and imitate the rigor and precision of the established sciences in gathering and interpreting data. The important features of the new approach were experimentation and quantification. Psychological experimentation received early direction from the German psychophysicists, especially Fechner and Helmholtz. Next, Wilhelm Wundt founded the first psychological laboratory, at Leipzig in 1879. By 1900 such laboratories were common as centers for research and training, especially in the United States. Although they were at first preoccupied with such psychophysical phenomena as sense perception and reaction time, many laboratories later turned to investigations of memory, learning, and problem solving. The methodological prototypes of contemporary American psychological investigation and data gathering were soon evident: G. Stanley Hall's questionnaires, Thorndike's problem boxes and paper-and-pencil tests, Charles Judd's instruments. By 1900 the "new psychology" was committed to the use of quantification: in the collection of empirical data through counting and measuring, as a statistical method of testing hypotheses, and as the universal language of scientific reporting. Public record keeping was improving rapidly, furnishing a potentially invaluable source of social science data. Still more important were early refinements in statistical methods of manipulating data. Galton developed the correlation coefficient for biology and applied it to psychology; he also used certain conceptual tools of astronomy. Pearson, Spearman, and Cattell contributed early improvements, and Thorndike popularized the statistical treatment of social science data, writing the first influential handbook in the field, An Introduction to the Theory of Mental and Social Measurements (1904). Thorndike's statement, "Whatever exists, exists in some amount and can be measured," epitomizes his devotion to quantification. There was yet another component in the intellectual legacy available to Thorndike. American pragmatism was evolving as an articulated philosophical system, and although Thorndike was not an exponent of philosophical pragmatism, he approached science from a pragmatic standpoint. He rejected traditionalism, sentimentalism, and a priori postulates. His theories of value and social action were firmly guided by appraisals of consequences. Furthermore, he helped to give American psychology its behavioristic and functional cast; behavior was to give the social sciences their data, and behavior was to test their theories.
THORNDIKE, EDWARD L. The formative years. Thorndike was born in Williamsburg, Massachusetts, the second of four children. His father, Edward Roberts Thorndike, was first a lawyer, then a Methodist clergyman. The religious environment of the home has been described as rather austere, and the children were active in church activities. As an adult Thorndike helped support the local Methodist church financially but did not attend or require attendance of his children. He believed churches had certain benefits for some people and could perform useful philanthropic tasks; however, he sought to guide his own life by ethical and not religious precepts. Intellectual pursuits were important in his childhood home-, his mother, Abigail Thorndike, described as highly intelligent, may well have encouraged them, and they were certainly stimulated by contact with the several intellectual, sophisticated congregations in the Boston-Cambridge area to which his father ministered. The children had good academic records and won scholarships and other aid, permitting them all to complete college despite the family's modest finances. The eldest son, Ashley, became a professor of English; Lynn, the third son, a historian; and Mildred, the youngest child, a high school English teacher. At one time or another, all three Thorndike brothers were professors at Columbia University. During Thorndike's boyhood the family moved frequently, propelled by the regulation that a. Methodist minister must change congregations every few years. Thorndike attended elementary schools in several Massachusetts towns, and high schools in Lowell, Boston, and Providence, R. I. Although his schooling did not suffer because of these frequent moves, the discontinuity in social contacts may have contributed to a certain reticence, extreme self-reliance, and lack of easy sociability apparent in the mature Thorndike. He came to prefer a small circle of cherished friends and disliked routine gatherings, whether they were faculty meetings or national scientific conventions. His work consumed his time and attention, wherever he was, and he found personal contention, competition, and the effort to influence others distasteful, viewing such activities as distractions from the research to which he had devoted himself. Thorndike entered Wesleyan University in Connecticut in 1891 without having chosen a career. As a boy he had had no interest in science; rather, his early bent had been toward English, a field to which he indirectly returned much later via word counts, semantic and phonetic studies, the authorship of dictionaries, and a theory of speech origins. He pursued the standard classical curriculum at
9
Wesleyan, graduating in 1895 with honors, including membership in Phi Beta Kappa, but still without a commitment to any field. However, he had read William James's The Principles of Psychology and found its ideas and erudition extremely impressive. A scholarship to Harvard University permitted him to sample several disciplines, and after study under James, Thorndike decided upon psychology. He earned another bachelor's degree in 1896 and an M.A. in 1897. Although he had no intention of specializing in comparative psychology, Thorndike began experimental studies of animal learning, convinced that the existing research was impoverished and unsound. A substantial fellowship at Columbia University took him to New York City in 1897 to complete his doctoral study. Columbia offered additional training in biology and statistics, and James McKeen Cattell provided him with laboratory space. The next year Thorndike published his doctoral dissertation, Animal Intelligence (1898-1901). Rarely has a doctoral thesis earned the appellation "classic"; yet Thorndike's study was just that—a classic in comparative psychology, in learning theory, and in psychological methodology. Academic career. In 1898 Thorndike began teaching at the college for women at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. On the recommendation of William James he returned to New York City in 1899 for a one-year trial as instructor in psychology and child study at Teachers College, Columbia University; thus began a forty-year association with that school. In 1901 he became adjunct professor and, in 1904, professor of educational psychology. He took on additional duties in 1922 as director of the division of psychology at the new Institute of Educational Research connected with Teachers College. He retired in 1940 but continued writing and published Selected Writings From a Connectionist's Psychology in 1949. He died in the early morning of August 9, 1949, at Montrose, New York, a few days short of his 75th birthday. He was survived by his wife, Elizabeth Moulton, whom he had married in 1900, and their four children: Elizabeth Frances, born in 1902, a mathematician; Edward Moulton, born in 1905, and Alan, 1918, both physicists; and Robert Ladd, 1910, a psychologist. Thorndike was awarded numerous honors during his lifetime: the presidencies of several scientific societies and honorary degrees from American and foreign universities. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Foreign recognition brought him
10
THORNDIKE, EDWARD L.
honorary membership in the British Psychological Society, the Comenius Educational Association of Czechoslovakia, and the Leningrad Scientific-Medical Pedological Society. In 1925, for his contributions to psychological measurement and its applications to education, Columbia University awarded Thorndike the Butler medal in gold, granted once every five years for the most distinguished contribution made anywhere in the world to philosophy or to educational theory, practice, or administration. He served on various committees and commissions and was head of the comparative psychology department at the marine biology laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, from 1900 to 1902. A theory of learning. For Thorndike's generation of experimental psychologists, the study of mental processes had the greatest attraction. In Animal Intelligence Thorndike set down what proved to be a lasting framework for his theory of mind and the laws of learning. He brought into the twentieth century the British tradition of "associationism"; his own learning theory came to be called "connectionism," or sometimes "stimulusresponse theory." The experiment that provided him with the empirical basis of his theory was the following: Observing the behavior of kittens as they tried to escape from simple boxes he had built, Thorndike concluded that it was random trial-and-error behavior that led to the animals' striking the latch that would open the cage. The desirable consequence was then gradually associated with the one correct movement that would bring it about, and the unrewarded errors were eliminated. According to Thorndike, mind has no separate identity as such, being merely a collective name for the brain cells, nerve cells, and chemicoelectric operations by which man reacts to internal and external stimulation. Thorndike had an unremitting bias in favor of physiological and biological explanations. In 1940 he reiterated this prejudice when he wrote that doctrines about processes such as learning, instinct, and suggestion—processes that can be translated into terms of conductivity, connection, facilitation, and other "known" neural actions—are "preferable to doctrines which rely upon fields of force, tensions, equilibria, valences, barriers, libido, specialized energies," all yet undemonstrated in the neurons (1940, p. 189). Mind, said Thorndike, is man's "connection system," forming a bond between some stimulus— Thorndike preferred the word "situation," recognizing the complexity of many stimuli—and some response made to it by the learner. All that a man knows, feels, "wants," or does is dependent upon
his having formed a connection between some situation and some response. The term "habit" is equally useful in accounting for a routine motor act or for a lofty abstraction; there are no qualitative differences between simple learning and the so-called higher mental processes. Thorndike's "laws of learning" explain the connection processes. His "law of exercise" recalls the principle of "frequency," or "use," found in nineteenth-century association theory: a response made is likely to be made again, merely as a result of having been made before. The "law of effect" states that the consequences (satisfying or not satisfying) of a response will increase or decrease the probability that the connection was formed and that the response will be repeated. Vaguely implied in the writings of Alexander Bain and the British animal psychologist C. Lloyd Morgan, the law of effect was made an articulate and heuristic principle of learning by Thorndike. Although the law confirmed common-sense observations, Thorndike's proposition that consequences can work back upon a stimulus-response connection neurologically has provoked considerable debate and experimentation. Thorndike's work on the amount and explanation of the transfer of training, beginning with the landmark Thorndike-Woodworth experiments published as "The Influence of Improvement in One Mental Function Upon the Efficiency of Other Functions" (Thorndike & Woodworth 1901), also sparked controversy. His research showed that learning any one skill has little effect upon the rate or ease of learning another, even for quite similar tasks. Furthermore, the small amount of transfer that does occur, he maintained, can be credited to the presence of "identical elements" in the two tasks or situations; it is not the result of insight or reason or conscious application of principles. Since educators argued that school subjects as disparate as the classical languages, mathematics, and manual training should all be included in the curriculum because of their "formal discipline" powers—their ability to train the memory, sharpen perceptions, and improve attention—considerable opposition was aroused. On the other hand, those educators who pleaded for a curriculum embodying content and activities that were highly specific, practical, and obviously relevant to daily life were encouraged by Thorndike's results. Determinants of human abilities. Thorndike believed that intellectual and achievement differences between people are quantitative, not qualitative. Individuals differ in the number and complexity of the connections that they possess and, beyond that, in their capacity to form connections. He held
THORNDIKE, EDWARD L. heredity to be primarily responsible for human equality. He scorned environmental explanations and was interested in eugenics as a means of improving human beings and society, thus perpetuating the views of Galton, for one. Furthermore, Thorndike supported an established American belief: expressed in common-sense terms, it asserted the triumph of character over circumstances, the faith that the ingredients of success are in a man and not around him. The cultural ethos had emphasized character, perseverance, intuition, and good judgment; Thorndike added a high order of intelligence as a basic ingredient in the American success story. With refinements in measures of individual variation and their more extensive use, the heredityenvironment debate became more heated.The validity of political, educational, welfare, and religious policies was at stake, and social science research was called upon to justify opposing views. All through the years when environmental theories were dominant—owing partly to social reform movements and partly to the cogency of Pavlovian conditioning theories and of Watson's brand of behaviorism—Thorndike held his ground. While his later writings acknowledged the importance of chance factors, such as opportunity, in determining whether innate potentialities would be realized, he consistently believed that heredity was prepotent and that the egalitarian vision of a true parity— whether attempted through education or a welfare state—was indeed just a dream. Practical applications. In 1917-1918 Thorndike served on the Committee on Classification of Personnel for the United States Army, traveling between Washington, D.C., and his teaching duties in New York. The committee was responsible for the "Army Alpha" project, which was the first mass testing of intelligence, and which subsequently stimulated testing in schools, colleges, and industry. (The ultimate result of his and others' efforts was the Army General Classification Test used in World War n.) Large numbers of people were trained in test construction and administration. The terms "intelligence quotient" (IQ) and "mental age" entered popular language. Furthermore, public attention was called to the great and inborn physical, intellectual, and educational differences found in the population and to the inequalities resulting from regional isolation and inadequate local schooling, which failed to develop the natural abilities of thousands of people. Adult education programs were invigorated when Thorndike's investigations of adult learning in the 1920s showed that innate and individual factors and not age are the determinants
11
of the amount and quality of achievement and the ability to continue learning. Thorndike contributed both directly and indirectly to the development of efficient, scientifically based schooling, the desire for which had begun late in the nineteenth century. He was influential as a teacher of psychology to teachers: early books like Notes on Child Study (1901), The Principles of Teaching Based on Psychology (1906), and Education: A First Book (1912) turned teachers toward a concern for human nature and the learning process and enlisted their support for the scientific movement in education. Thorndike's numerous articles reporting studies using schoolchildren, school subjects, and various testing approaches were published between 1900 and 1925. The 1907 Annual Report of the U.S. Bureau of Education disclosed the statistics on pupils leaving school before graduation, dramatizing the inadequacies of existing programs and the extent of school retardation and thus giving aid to reformers of curriculum and teaching methods. Thorndike contributed much to the growing awareness of individual differences and to plans for educating the whole range of American children. The main divisions of modern educational psychology—measurement, learning, and individual differences—correspond to Thorndike's own major interests. Thorndike was active in the preparation of school materials and tools; various achievement scales, especially for handwriting and drawing, were one result. The psychology of school subjects became a preoccupation of some educational psychologists, and the Thorndike arithmetic and algebra texts were in widespread use. He also prepared college entrance examinations, a test for selecting students for the Columbia School of Law, and one of the best regarded of intelligence tests, the CAVD scale. (The acronym stands for sentence completion, arithmetical reasoning, vocabulary, and the ability to follow directions.) His counts of word usage established the basic vocabulary now used in virtually all school reading books, spellers, and spelling lists, and on achievement tests. The Teachers College program of training in statistics and measurement as applied to education inspired other attempts to create a scientific approach to curriculum selection and to school administration. Experimental schools multiplied and research on city schools increased. Thorndike would have taken great exception to the poor controls, naivete, and pretentious pseudoscientism that often prevailed; nevertheless, the sponsors of these activities looked to Thorndike and to his institution for stimulation.
12
THORNDIKE, EDWARD L.
Theoretical work. There is much evidence to confirm the psychologist Irving Lorge's description of Thorndike, his teacher and close friend, as a great eclectic. This can partly be attributed to Thorndike's responsiveness to opportunities and requests to conduct studies. It is also related to the fact that the direction of Thorndike's interests was determined not exclusively by the logic of inquiry but also by the nature of the criticisms that were made of his work: when his work was challenged, he sought new evidence to support his theories, and this search for new evidence often led him in unexpected directions. It was a challenge to the "law of effect" that led to Thorndike's discovery of the "spread," or "scatter," phenomenon. He devised numerous experiments: for example, subjects were asked to supply missing words in a long series of statements, the experimenter rewarding certain answers by saying "right" and punishing others by saying "wrong," according to a predetermined key. Each series was repeated two or three times in succession. Predictably, the studies revealed that words that were rewarded were repeated—the connection was strengthened; they were "learned." Surprisingly, however, some words called "wrong" were also repeated, the more so the nearer in distance they were to the "right" words; words in the series just before and just after the rewarded words received the maximum scatter effect from the reward's power in strengthening responses, while those four or five words removed from the rewarded word were barely affected. Such findings tended to corroborate Thorndike's contention that the law of effect operates irrespective of reason, in a mechanical or automatic fashion. The repetition of an action called "right" can be considered evidence that reason guides learning. But repetition of erroneous responses as a result of symbolic rewards, and irrespective of the subject's understanding or insight, seriously challenges the cognitive psychologist's basic thesis. Thorndike regarded this as his most important contribution to scientific advancement. Further evidence of Thorndike's continued growth was his reversal of his early views on reward and punishment in learning. He first believed these to be simple opposites within the law of effect. Later investigation showed that reward is the more effective and stable "confirming" agent; punishment may sometimes strengthen a connection rather than consistently weaken it. He also showed that belief in a simple hedonism was unwarranted; small satisfactions usually work as well as large rewards. The implications of his findings about reward and punishment were neglected, Thorndike complained, by
educational, governmental, and penal institutions and by welfare agencies. In 1929 Thorndike surprised the Ninth International Congress of Psychology, meeting at Yale University, by announcing that he had long erred in maintaining that "exercise" and "effect" were companion laws of equal potency. He had come to believe instead that exercise—mere repetition of a response—was of minor importance in explaining the formation and strengthening of connections. As a result of this new conviction, he began a massive experimental program. A series of books published in the 1930s, Human Learning (1931), The Fundamentals of Learning (1932), and The Psychology of Wants, Interests, and Attitudes (1935), reveal a theory trying to come to terms with data. As Leo Postman has observed, Thorndike clearly did not consider connectionism a finished product (Postman 1962, pp. 340, 349). It was in the 1920s and 1930s that psychology became most highly fragmented into conflicting schools, each differing in its research methods, problems studied, and in its experimental results. New principles—like "belongingness," an explanation of the way certain things are connected by the learner because they "seem to go together"—were used by Thorndike merely to account for variations in the operations of his basic and still mechanistic principles of learning. Similarly, he considered "mental set"—the observed tendency to respond to some things in an environment of possible stimuli and to disregard other things—to be the residue of established stimulus-response bonds still operating to condition the making of new connections. He continued to concede little to gestaltist criticism and what he called the "possibly sound elements of Freudianism" (1940, pp. 336 ff.). His theoretical pre-eminence in the 1930s was unquestioned; as Edward C. Tolman observed: The psychology of animal learning—not to mention that of child learning—has been and still is primarily a matter of agreeing or disagreeing with Thorndike, or trying in minor ways to improve upon him. Gestalt psychologists, conditioned-reflex psychologists, signgestalt psychologists—all of us here in America seem to have taken Thorndike, overtly or covertly, as our starting point. And we have felt very smart and pleased with ourselves if we could show that we have, even in some very minor way, developed new little wrinkles of our own. (1938, p. 11) Interest in other social sciences. The economic and social conditions of the 1930s stimulated the social sciences. The Carnegie Corporation, for example, offered Thorndike a large grant, which enabled him to apply his methods and theories to a
THORNDIKE, EDWARD L. study of various social problems. While he was not interested in direct political activity, he had strong conservative and individualistic views, which emerged clearly in his writings of this period. At this time he was no longer primarily concerned with psychological theory. For instance, using census data and other statistics, he tried to analyze cities as he had earlier studied individuals. In Your City (1939) he presented the results and concluded that "good" cities are the result of good people whom they attract; good cities do not create good people. This was yet another expression of his hereditarian position; it had no discernible influence upon urban sociology. His massive Human Nature and the Social Order (1940) was a compendium of information about human abilities, behavior, and wants, general psychological principles, and the facts of individuality. He contended that the social sciences require such knowledge of how humans behave, what people can be and do, and what they want to be and do, and he suggested applications of this knowledge to many fields: economics, government, philanthropy, religion, law, ethics. In 1943 he wrote Man and His Works, which was similar in conception but on a far smaller scale. Thorndike's direct influence upon the social sciences other than psychology was probably small. However, the rapid growth of psychology may have indirectly favored development of the other behavioral fields. Some social psychologists now use Hullian principles, a synthesis of Thorndike and Pavlov; but they often take learning theory largely for granted. Thorndike himself always made motivation secondary to learning: men act the way they do because such behavior has previously been reinforced. Thorndike's influence on later work with attitude scales is doubtful. Statistical training has only lately become a common part of the sociologist's education. And anthropologists and sociologists have studied intelligence testing primarily for what it reveals about cultural bias. Major differences in points of departure between the several social sciences and the kind of psychology that interested Thorndike help explain this independent development. According to Thorndike, individual behavior, with all its variations, takes precedence over language, customs, and laws as a determinant of social action. This view of man contrasts with that of the sociologists, namely, that men are members of social groups and that although all men are not basically the same, their similarities are more crucial than their differences. Another important distinction between psychology and the other social sciences is the differential
13
emphasis given to environmental factors. Many social scientists have concluded, as a result of comparative cultural studies, that psychologists have exaggerated the importance of inherited qualities. The hereditarian Thorndike, however, continually saw all environments as the product of the genetic equipment of their inhabitants. On one issue—the future possibilities of social science—there was common, widespread agreement among social scientists; it is reflected in Thorndike's reiteration in 1940 of his lifelong certainty that "the welfare of mankind now depends upon the sciences of man . . ." (1940, preface). GERALDINE JONCICH [For the historical context and subsequent development of Thorndike's ideas, see INTELLIGENCE AND INTELLIGENCE TESTING; LEARNING; and the biographies of many of the psychologists mentioned in the text.] WORKS BY THORNDIKE
(1898-1901) 1911 Animal Intelligence: Experimental Studies. New York: Macmillan. (1901) 1903 Notes on Child Study. 2d ed. New York: Macmillan. 1901 THORNDIKE, EDWARD L.; and WOODWORTH, ROBERT S. The Influence of Improvement in One Mental Function Upon the Efficiency of Other Functions. Psychological Review 8:247-261, 384-395, 553-564. (1904) 1913 An Introduction to the Theory of Mental and Social Measurements. 2d ed. New York: Columbia Univ., Teachers College. 1906 The Principles of Teaching Based on Psychology. New York: Seller. 1912 Education: A First Book. New York: Macmillan. (1913-1914) 1921 Educational Psychology. 3 vols. New York: Columbia Univ., Teachers College. -> Volume 1: The Original Nature of Man. Volume 2: The Psychology of Learning. Volume 3: Mental Work and Fatigue and Individual Differences and Their Causes. Part 2 of Volume 3 first appeared in 1903 as Educational Psychology. 1931 Human Learning. New York: Appleton. 1932 The Fundamentals of Learning. New York: Columbia Univ., Teachers College. 1933 An Experimental Study of Rewards. Teachers College Contributions to Education, No. 580. New York: Columbia Univ., Teachers College. 1935 The Psychology of Wants, Interests, and Attitudes. New York: Appleton. 1936 Autobiography. Volume 3, pages 263-270 in A History of Psychology in Autobiography. Edited by Carl Murchison. Worcester, Mass.: Clark Univ. Press. 1939 Your City. New York: Harcourt. 1940 Human Nature and the Social Order. New York: Macmillan. 1943 Man and His Works. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. Psychology and the Science of Education: Selected Writings. Edited by Geraldine M. Joncich. New York: Columbia Univ., Teachers College, 1962. ->• Published posthumously. Contains writings first published between 1901 and 1939.
14
THORNTON, HENRY
Selected Writings From a Connectionist's Psychology. New York: Appleton, 1949. -» Contains writings first published between 1913 and 1946. WORKS ABOUT
THORNDIKE
CURTI, MERLE E. (1935) 1959 Edward Lee Thorndike, Scientist: 1874-1949. Pages 459-498 in Merle E. Curti, The Social Ideas of American Educators. New ed., rev. Paterson, N.J.: Littlefield. Edward L. Thorndike: 1874-1949. 1949 Teachers College Record 51:26-45. -> See especially pages 42-45 for a bibliography of Thorndike's publications from 1940-1949. GARRETT, HENRY E. (1930) 1951 Great Experiments in Psychology. 3d ed. New York: Appleton. -> See especially "Thorndike's Law of Learning," pages 40-62. GOODENOUGH, FLORENCE L. 1950 Edward Lee Thorndike. American Journal of Psychology 63:291-301. HULLFISH, H. GORDON 1926 Aspects of Thorndike's Psychology in Their Relation to Educational Theory and Practice. Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press. In Honor of Edward Lee Thorndike. 1926 Teachers College Record 27:457-586. -> An annotated, chronological bibliography of Thorndike's publications appears on pages 466-515. In Honor of E. L. Thorndike. 1940 Teachers College Record 41:695-788. H> See especially pages 699-725 for a bibliography of Thorndike's publications from 1898-1940. WOODWORTH, ROBERT S. 1952 Edward Lee Thorndike, 1874-1949. Volume 27, pages 209-237 in National Academy of Sciences, Washington, B.C., Biographical Memoirs. Washington: The Academy. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
BORING, EDWIN G. (1929) 1950 A History of Experimental Psychology. 2d ed. New York: Appleton. HILGARD, ERNEST R.; and BOWER, GORDON H. (1948) 1966 Theories of Learning. 3d ed. New York: Appleton. GRATA, PEDRO T. 1928 The Theory of Identical Elements. Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press. POSTMAN, LEO 1962 Rewards and Punishments in Human Learning. Pages 331-401 in Leo Postman (editor), Psychology in the Making: Histories of Selected Research Problems. New York: Knopf. TOLMAN, EDWARD C. 1938 The Determiners of Behavior at a Choice Point. Psychological Review 45:1—41.
THORNTON, HENRY Henry Thornton (1760-1815), banker, philanthropist, and member of Parliament, is celebrated among economists as the author of An Enquiry Into the Nature and Effects of the Paper Credit of Great Britain, published in 1802, one of the most important and original contributions to monetary theory ever written. He was born at Clapham of a pious and prosperous city family which had moved from Yorkshire earlier in the century. Both his father and grandfather had been in the Russian trade and had been directors of the Bank of Eng-
land. After a schooling of which he himself was subsequently very critical, Thornton duly became a banker, joining the house of Down, Thornton, and Frere in 1784. Two years previously he had been elected member of Parliament for Southwark, and he retained the seat for the rest of his life. In 1792 he bought a house at Battersea Rise on Clapham Common, which, after his marriage in 1796, he populated with nine children. Before that, he had shared his house with William Wilberforce, the antislavery leader, his second cousin and very close friend, and around them there grew up what came to be known as the Clapham sect, an austerely evangelical wing of the Church of England. The group included John Venn, Hannah More, James Stephen, and Zachary Macaulay, father of the historian (none of them except Thornton stayed in Clapham for very long). Thornton himself was the author of a collection of family prayers, published in 1834, and it is said of him that before his marriage he devoted six-sevenths of his income to charity; after it, one-third. He served as president of the Sunday School Society and treasurer of the Religious Tract Society, the Church Missionary Society, and the British and Foreign Bible Society, all of which were founded by the Clapham sect. These societies left their mark not only in nineteenth-century Britain but also in other parts of the world. In Parliament Thornton rejected any party connection but tended to side with the Whigs. He supported parliamentary reform, Catholic emancipation, and the progressive income tax. But it was in dealing with problems of currency and banking that he made his great reputation, first in 1797 with his lucid and expert evidence to the committees of the House of Commons and the House of Lords inquiring into the suspension of cash payments by the Bank of England. He was a member of the committee on the Irish currency in 1804, and in 1810 he was a leading member of, and apparently part author of the famous report by, the "Bullion Committee, appointed to inquire into the cause of the high price of Gold Bullion, and to take into consideration the state of the Circulating Medium, and of the Exchanges between Great Britain and Foreign Parts." Thornton was also a member of the committee which inquired into the corn trade in 1813, and one of his last parliamentary speeches was in the important debate on the corn laws in the following year. Monetary theory. His contributions to monetary theory are contained mainly in his Enquiry on paper credit, although they are also to be found in his evidence to the committees of 1797 on the sus-
THORNTON, HENRY pension of cash payments and in his parliamentary speeches of 1811 on the bullion report. In the introduction to the Enquiry Thornton stated that his original intention had been "merely to expose some popular errors" regarding the suspension of cash payments in 1797, the policy of the Bank of England, and the effects of paper currency on prices. But there existed at the time little in the way of an accepted corpus of doctrine on monetary theory and policy on which he could build; Thornton does refer to the previous writings of Smith, Hume, Steuart, Locke, and Montesquieu, which must have constituted all, or nearly all, that existed in the way of monetary theory. Moreover, banking institutions and practices had been changing and developing considerably in the closing decades of the eighteenth century, particularly with regard to the rapid growth of country banking. In order to support and elucidate his diagnosis of the current problem, therefore—which he presented in masterly fashion—Thornton not only had to elucidate the basic concepts and hypotheses of a theory of money, but also had to explain the recent developments and workings of the British banking system. Perhaps the comprehensive character of his task, which no doubt did not emerge until his work was under way, made for a certain lack of clear-cut, systematic arrangement. His contribution to monetary theory has to be extricated from its setting amid the topical diagnosis and the expert institutional description. In part, Thornton's Enquiry seems to have been intended as a defense of the Bank of England against the attack by Walter Boyd in his pamphlet of 1801 ("A Letter to the Right Honourable William Pitt, on the Influence of Stoppage of Issues of Specie at the Bank of England; on the Prices of Provisions and Other Commodities"), the most prominent of a number of pamphlets attacking the Bank of England on the ground that its excessive issue of paper money had been responsible for a general rise in prices. In Chapter 4 of the Enquiry, Thornton stressed the bank's freedom from governmental "dictation" and its devotion to "the support of commercial as well as of public credit in general" (Enquiry, p. 109). Against the charge of over-issue Thornton was particularly concerned to emphasize that it is "merely theoretic" to suppose that it is always "a paramount duty of the Bank of England to diminish its notes, in some sort of regular proportion to that diminution which it experiences in its gold" (p. 116). He stressed the danger that sudden deflationary measures could lead to falling production and unemployment (or "an intermission in manufacturing labour"). Thornton insisted that "it
15
may be hoped, however, that at least one point has now been fully and completely established, namely, that there may be an error on the side of too much diminishing bank notes, as well as on the side of too much increasing them" (p. 124). Although Thornton was, in 1802, prepared to defend the Bank of England's position with regard to the suspension of cash payments in 1797 and the slight degree of inflation in the ensuing five years, by 1810, as a member of the Bullion Committee, he had become thoroughly critical of the bank and in favor of a contraction of the note issue. Thornton's contributions to monetary theory may be summarized under four main heads: money; rapidity of circulation; interest, prices, and employment; international economic relations. Money. He elucidated the concept of money and the range of types of money, near money, and money substitutes. He emphasized that although legally the distinction between what is "legal tender" and what is not is, of course, clear-cut, in fact, each type of money or near money is certainly a close and easy (if not a perfect) substitute for its nextdoor neighbor in the spectrum, so that if the supply of one type were tightened or cut off, other types could and would be resorted to: . . . if bank paper were abolished, a substitute for it would be likely to be found, to a certain degree, in bills of exchange. . . . But further; if bills and bank notes were extinguished, other substitutes than gold would unquestionably be found. Recourse would be had to devices of various kinds. . . . Merely by the transfer of the debts of one merchant to another, in the books of the banker, a large portion of what are termed cash payments is effected at this time without the use of any bank paper, and a much larger sum would be thus transferred, if guineas were the only circulating medium of the country. Credit would still exist. . . . (Enquiry, pp. 100-101) In fact Thornton saw that although the different means of payment may differ in legal respects, they may, as Schumpeter said, "on a certain level of abstraction be treated as essentially alike" ([1954] 1960, p. 719). Rapidity of circulation. Thornton analyzed "the rapidity of circulation" and its variations and how these depend on the state of confidence and business conditions. A "high state of confidence" quickens the circulation of bank notes. [It] contributes to make men provide less amply against contingencies. At such a time, they trust, that if the demand upon them for a payment, which is now doubtful and contingent, should actually be made, they shall be able to provide for it at the moment. . . . When, on the contrary, a season of distrust arises, prudence suggests, that the loss of interest arising
16
THORNTON, HENRY
from a detention of notes for a few additional days should not be regarded. (Enquiry, pp. 96-97) Later Thornton referred to the fact that Bank of England paper bears no interest and emphasized the "loss sustained by keeping it" (p. 234). Here, without being aware of it, Thornton was developing ideas about "the rapidity of circulation" to be found earlier in Cantillon, while, of course, also pointing forward to the Keynesian analysis of liquidity preference. Interest, prices, and employment. Thornton made three very important theoretical contributions to the understanding of the relationships between money, interest, and the level of prices and employment. (1) In the first of his parliamentary speeches of 1811 on the Bullion Report, Thornton analyzed the distinction between the "real" and the "nominal" rates of interest, namely, the distinction between the actual "nominal" rate and this rate corrected into "real" terms for changes in the value of money —a distinction subsequently developed by Irving Fisher (in his Appreciation and Interest, 1896) and by Marshall. He showed the significance of this distinction in a period in which rising prices are more or less anticipated by borrowers, pointing out how the unexpected gains from previous borrowings will provide "so much additional temptation to borrow" (pp. 335-336). (2) More important than this analysis was Thornton's anticipation of Wicksell's distinction between the "natural" and the market rates of interest, that is, between the (expected) rate of return on investment and the market rate at which funds may be borrowed. When developing this distinction Thornton had been concerned to refute the argument that the canons of sound banking practice—with regard to lending only on good security, or discounting only "real" commercial bills—are sufficient to contain or prevent inflationary rises in prices. (He pointed out, also, how a rate of interest of 5 per cent, then the highest the Bank of England was, under the usury laws, even in time of war, statutorily permitted to charge, might be quite insufficient when the expected rate of return on borrowing might be much higher.) He showed that it is pointless to argue that "a liberal extension of loans would soon satisfy all demands" in conditions where the generally expected rate of profit on investment exceeds the market rate of interest: In order to ascertain how far the desire of obtaining loans at the bank may be expected at any time to be carried, we must enquire into the subject of the quantum of profit likely to be derived from borrowing there under the existing circumstances. This is to be judged
of by considering two points: the amount, first of interest to be paid on the sum borrowed; and, secondly, of the mercantile or other gain to be obtained by the employment of the borrowed capital, (p. 253) (3) Thornton analyzed the effects of credit expansion on the level of output, employment, and savings. He certainly made no general assumption of full employment, arguing that if there are "antecedently idle persons," an increase in "new capital" will first bring these into employment, but as it continues "it will set to work labourers, of whom a part will be drawn from other, and, perhaps, no less useful occupations" (p. 236). Thus, "although additional industry will be one effect of an extraordinary emission of paper, a rise in the cost of articles will be another" (p. 237). Thornton then showed how, if the rise in prices proceeds, with money wages remaining the same, "some augmentation of stock will be the consequence; for the labourer, according to this supposition, may be forced by his necessity to consume fewer articles" (p. 239). This is the process explained almost simultaneously by Bentham as "forced frugality" and by subsequent writers as "forced saving." It is interesting to note that Ricardo, in his comments on Bentham, holding firmly to the Turgot-Smith "saving is investing" doctrine, completely rejected this analysis with the question: "Why should the mere increase of money have any other effect than to lower its value? How would it cause any increase in the production of commodities? . . . Money cannot call forth goods—but goods can call forth money" (see Ricardo [1811] 1951, pp. 298, 301). International economic relations. Thornton contributed some important ideas about the monetary aspects of international economic relations. He anticipated what later came to be known as the purchasing power parity theory by showing how gold will tend to move between countries toward equilibrium, a distribution in which no profits will be possible from any further gold transfers. He went on to trace out, on the lines of Hume and others, how the mechanism of adjustment works through changes in relative prices to restore equilibrium, for example if equilibrium were disturbed by a bad harvest and were followed by an expansion of imports. Thornton's ideas were influential in his day; a brilliant review article by Francis Homer in the first number of the Edinburgh Review (1802) enhanced that influence. But his subtler insights came to be overshadowed by the simpler (and perhaps cruder) formulas of Ricardo, and over the decades the influence of his book receded. J. S. Mill in his Principles of Political Economy of 1848
THUNEN, JOHANN HEINRICH VON hailed Thornton's work as the clearest exposition of its subject, and some of Mill's contributions to the theory of international trade may show the influence of Thornton. But after Mill, Thornton's name almost disappeared until scholars in this century, notably Jacob H. Hollander and Jacob Viner, rediscovered his work. With the development of modern monetary theory from Wicksell to Keynes it came to be realized how much had been anticipated by Thornton, and Hayek's valuable 1939 edition of Thornton's work restored to him the eminent place in the history of monetary theory which is his due. T. W. HUTCHISON [For discussion of the subsequent development of Thornton's ideas, see BANKING, CENTRAL; INCOME AND EMPLOYMENT
THEORY;
INTEREST;
LIQUIDITY
PREFERENCE; MONEY; and the biographies of FISHER, IRVING; MARSHALL; WICKSELL.] WORKS BY THORNTON An Enquiry Into the Nature and Effects of the Paper Credit of Great Britain (1802); Evidence Given Before the Committees of Secrecy of the Two Houses of Parliament on the Bank of England, March and April 1797; Some Manuscript Notes; and Speeches on the Bullion Report, May 1811. Edited with an introducton by F. A. von Hayek. New York: Farrar & Rinehart; London: Allen & Unwin, 1939. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
FORSTER, E. M. 1956 Marianne Thornton: A Domestic Biography: 1797-1887. New York: Harcourt. HORNER, FRANCIS (1802) 1957 [A Book Review of] An Enquiry Into the Nature and Effects of the Paper Credit of Great Britain, by Henry Thornton. Pages 28-56 in Francis Horner, The Economic Writings of Francis Horner in The Edinburgh Review, 1802-1806. Edited with an introduction by Frank Whitson Fetter. London School of Economics and Political Science. MEACHAM, STANDISH 1964 Henry Thornton of Clapham: 1760-1815. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. -» Contains a bibliography of Thornton's works on pages 163-168. RICARDO, DAVID (1811) 1951 Notes on Bentham's "Sur les Prix," 1810-1811. Pages 259-341 in David Ricardo, Works and Correspondence. Volume 3: Pamphlets and Papers, 1809-1811. Cambridge Univ. Press. SCHUMPETER, JOSEPH A. (1954) 1960 History of Economic Analysis. Edited by E. B. Schumpeter. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. -> See especially pages 688-750, "Money, Credit and Cycles."
THUNEN, JOHANN HEINRICH VON Johann Heinrich von Thiinen (1783-1850) was a German economist of great originality who contributed highly significant concepts and techniques to economic theory. He was the first to develop an
17
exact definition of marginal productivity in the modern sense (although he did not use the term) and to apply the principle generally in the theory of production and distribution. He was a founder of mathematical economics and of econometrics, combining systematic empirical research with a genius for abstract reasoning and generalization. Most of his economic theory is based upon models of general static equilibrium, often expressed in terms of systems of equations, but he also contributed to the theory of capital formation and economic growth. Other areas in which he pioneered include theories of economic location, rent, and enterprise profit and some of the more practical aspects of agricultural economics. He emphasized far more than did his English contemporaries the central economic problem of allocating scarce resources so as to maximize the achievement of defined goals. Von Thiinen was born on his father's estate in the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg. His education included training in practical agriculture as well as in the academic disciplines, particularly mathematics. He attended the Agricultural College at Gross-Flottbeck near Hamburg and spent two semesters at the University of Gottingen. In 1810 he purchased Tellow, an estate in Mecklenburg, where he carried on the extensive experiments and systematic data-gathering that became the empirical basis for his great work, Der isolierte Staat. Von Thiinen's book won him considerable recognition during his lifetime. According to Schumacher (1868), Rodbertus credited von Thiinen with bringing to economics the rare combination of a most exact method and a humane heart, and the British Parliament used von Thiinen's calculations of the grain production of the European continent in its deliberations on the corn laws. But the voluminous proportions of the work, its seemingly formidable mathematics, and its unusual originality appear to have prevented it from being either widely read or understood until the rediscovery of marginal analysis and the introduction of mathematical formulation into the mainstream of economic theory more than twenty years after von Thiinen's death. Alfred Marshall acknowledged a major debt to von Thiinen. Rent, profit, and the "isolated state." For theoretical purposes, von Thiinen set up a model economy which he called the "isolated state," consisting of a single city in the center of a large plain of uniformly fertile land. The inhabitants of the city exchange manufactured goods for the agricultural products of the plain, with the wagon as the sole means of transportation. Various agricultural prod-
18
THUNEN, JOHANN HEINRICH VON
ucts are grown in concentric circles around the city. The location at which each crop is grown is determined by the cost of transportation to the city, in accordance with what we would call the principle of "opportunity cost." Land use ranges from the growing of garden vegetables nearest the city to grazing in the most distant circle, with the land beyond that occupied by forest which can be cleared if the economy expands. Von Thiinen changed the conditions of the model from time to time, to facilitate comparison and to illustrate various principles, always in full awareness of its abstract character. Von Thiinen's theory of land rent is based upon the same fundamental principles as that of Ricardo. In the "isolated state" the rent of each unit of land is determined exclusively by the difference between the cost of transporting the crop of that unit to the market city and the cost of transporting there an equal quantity of produce from the most distant land in use that yields no rent. Estate revenue consists of interest on the transferable capital invested in improvements, which must be paid at the current rate if the improvements are to be maintained, and payment for the land itself, which is the only true rent. If total estate revenue falls below the interest on transferable capital, payment for the land may for a time be negative, but under these circumstances the estate will sooner or later be abandoned. Von Thiinen's distinction between enterprise profit and interest on capital is modern, and it contrasts with the then prevailing concept of "profit" as both enterprise profit and interest. The entrepreneur's profit consists only of that part of revenue which remains after he has deducted interest on his capital, an insurance premium against all insurable risks, and his own salary for management. This profit remains to the entrepreneur despite competition, because there is no insurance against such uncertainties as adverse price movements. Although the chances of gain are often as great as the chances of loss, the former do not compensate wholly for the latter, since the entrepreneur's pleasure from doubling his fortune is less intense than his suffering from its complete loss. Wages, interest, and marginal analysis. Von Thiinen's application of marginal analysis to the theories of wages, interest, and resource allocation —the most important of his contributions to economic theory—appears in Volume 2 of Der isolierte Staat and was worked out during the period 1826 to 1848. He used a number of mutually corroborating approaches to the problem, with verbal, nu-
merical, and algebraic modes of expression. A few brief examples follow. Using his model of the "isolated state," he assumed free, homogeneous, mobile laborers, who receive wages in excess of minimum subsistence and who are capable of producing products either for current consumption or for capital formation. In his analysis of capital formation essentially independent of the capitalist-laborer relationship, the workers either accumulate the excess of their wages over subsistence until they can devote a year's labor to capital formation while living on their accumulated stocks, or they form groups of workers, some of which produce capital while the rest simultaneously produce subsistence for the entire group, all members then sharing equally in the ownership of the new capital. Von Thiinen demonstrated that in competitive equilibrium the interest per unit of capital equals the increment of product value resulting from an increment of capital, all other inputs remaining constant. The same principle is then applied to labor. Both labor and capital are shown to be subject to diminishing incremental returns, but the marginal product of labor increases as the quantity of capital per worker increases. Von Thiinen emphasized the importance of using infinitesimal increments in the formal analysis. He also pointed out that the natural rates of wages and interest prevail only under conditions of ideal competition and resource mobility that unfortunately do not prevail in the real world. He demonstrated by verbal and algebraic statement and by numerous examples the principles of cost minimization (Marshall's "principle of substitution") and net revenue maximization, with emphatic assertions of their general applicability and their fundamental economic importance. Productive agents can be substituted for one another, and an optimum is reached when the ratio of their respective marginal products equals the ratio of their respective unit costs. Net revenue is maximized when the value-product of the last added unit of each agent just equals its cost. An appreciation of von Thiinen's method of analysis and an understanding of his interesting blunders can be achieved only by sampling his mathematical reasoning. Let a + y be the annual wage, in commodity units, of a working family, where a is one family's annual subsistence and y is surplus over subsistence available for capital accumulation. Let q be the average quantity of capital per working family, measured in units equal to the annual wage of one working family, a + y; p be the average annual product of one working
THUNEN, JOHANN HEINRICH VON family when assisted by q units of capital; and z be the rate of interest in percentage per annum. Then on no-rent land at the boundary of the isolated state, a + y + q(a + y}z = p, and with perfect competition and free mobility of labor and capital the rate of interest throughout the state is z = [p — (a + y}]/q(a + y). VonThiinen assumed that each working family converts its annual surplus, y, into capital and that each wishes to maximize the annual revenue on that capital, expressed as zy = y[p — (a + y~)]/q(a + y*), which is maximized when
dy\ q(a + y) Solving this equation for the "natural wage," he obtained a + y = \/~ap. Von Thiinen applied the marginal productivity principle as follows. One worker with q units of capital produces p units of product, and with q + l/n units of capital he produces p + /3 units of product, where n is some large number. Then l/n units of capital yield an annual revenue of f3 units of product, and one unit of capital yields n(3 or a units. The annual wage is then p — aq, and the value of the capital used by one worker is q(p — aq). The interest rate is then given by z = aq/q(p — aq) — a/(p — aq), a worker's annual surplus by y — p — aq — a, and the revenue by zy = a(p — aq — a)/(p — aq). Since o: = f ( q ) , von Thiinen differentiated this expression for zy with respect to a to find the value for q which maximizes zy, thus: _d / a ( p ~ aq — da\ p — aq
= 0,
and solved for the wage p — aq = V a p . Here the wage is determined as the remainder of the product p after interest (determined as the marginal product of capital) has been paid. To determine the wage on the basis of the marginal product of labor, he assumed an enterprise hiring n workers at a wage A and using nq units of capital. Revenue is n(p — A). With one less worker, each remaining worker uses nq/(n — 1) units of capital and produces p + v units of product. Total product is now (n — 1) (p + v), the wage bill is (n — 1)A, and the revenue of the enterprise is (n — 1) (p + i>) — (n — 1)A. If in equilibrium the wage equals the marginal product of labor, the discharge of a worker should leave the revenue unchanged, or np — nA - (n — I) (p + v) - (n — I )A. Solving for the wage, A = p— (n — l)i>. If n is very large, this expression approximates p ~ nv, and the cap-
19
ital per worker approximates q + q/n. Thus, each remaining worker has additional capital of q/n and produces additional product of v. By the previous example, when a worker has additional capital of l/n units, his product increases by ft. Therefore, v — (3q, and since n(3 = a, nv ~ aq. Substituting in the expression for the wage, A = p — nv = p — aq, which agrees with previous results and in equilibrium equals \/ap. Although von Thiinen was so impressed with his "natural wage" as the geometric mean of a worker's subsistence and the average product of labor that he had "\/ ap" engraved upon his tombstone, it is today no more than an intellectual curiosity. Neither a nor p can be analytically defined. There is no reason to suppose that a rational worker would want to maximize the annual interest on one year's savings. Measurement of a unit of capital by its wage cost alone is inconsistent with the assumption that each worker must use q units of capital, interest on which is part of the cost of the unit of capital. The importance of the work lies in its method of analysis and in the kinds of problems to which that method is applied.
ARTHUR H. LEIGH [See also RENT and SPATIAL ECONOMICS. Other relevant material may be found in the biographies of BOHM-BAWERK;
LAUNHARDT;
MARSHALL;
MOORE,
HENRY L.] WORKS BY THUNEN
Der isolierte Staat in Beziehung auf Landwirthschaft und Nationalokonomie. 3 vols. Jena (Germany): Fischer, 1930. -> Volume 1: Untersuchungen uber den Einfiuss, den die Getreidepreise, der Reichtum des Bodens und die Abgaben auf den Ackerbau ausiiben (1826). Volume 2: Der naturgemdsse Arbeitslohn und dessen Verhdltnis zum Zinsfuss und zur Landrente (18501863). Volume 3: Grundsdtze zur Bestimmung der Bodenrente, der vorteilhaftesten Umtriebszeit und des Wertes der Holzbestdnde von verschiedenem Alter fur Kieferwaldungen (1863). A partial translation of Volume 2 as "The Natural Wage and Its Relation to the Rate of Interest and to Economic Rent" is included in B. W. Dempsey, The Frontier Wage: The Economic Organization of Free Agents, published by the Loyola University Press, Chicago, 1960. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKERMANN, KONRAD P. 1954 Der ethisch-okonomische Erkldrungsdualismus in der Lehre vom naturgemdssen Arbeitslohn und Kapitalzins bei Joh. H. v. Thiinen unter Berucksichtigung des Grenzproduktivitdtsgedankens: Mit einem Anhang uber das Thiinen-Archiv und die neuere Thunen-Forschung. Winterthur (Switzerland): Keller. BOHM-BAWERK, EUGEN VON (1884-1912) 1959 Capital and Interest. 3 vols. South Holland, 111.: Libertarian Press. -» First published as Kapital und Kapitalzins.
20
THURNWALD, RICHARD
BULOW, FRIEDRICH 1950 Thiinen als Raumdenker. Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv 65:1-24. BULOW, FRIEDRICH 1958 Johann Heinrich von Thiinen als forstwirtschaftlicher Denker. Weltwirtschaftlich.es Archiv 80:183-234. CLARK, JOHN B. (1899) 1902 The Distribution of Wealth: A Theory of Wages, Interest and Profits. New York and London: Macmillan. -> Reprinted by Kelley in the "Reprints of Economic Classics." ENGELHARDT, WERNER 1953 Die Theorien der Produktion, des Preises und der Verteilung bei J. H. v. Thiinen: Analyse seines Werkes unter verandertem Blickpunkt. Schmollers Jahrbuch fur Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung und Volkswirtschaft im Deutschen Reiche 73:1-33. HOFFMAN, FRIEDRICH 1950 J. H. v. Thiinen im Blickfeld des deutschen Kameralismus. Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv 65:25-40. Johann Heinrich von Thiinen. 1958 Zeitschrift fur Agrargeschichte und Agrarsoziologie 6 (Special Issue). -> The entire issue is devoted to von Thiinen. KRZYMOWSK, RICHARD 1928 Graphical Presentation of Thiinen's Theory of Intensity. Journal of Farm Economics 10:461-482. LEIGH, ARTHUR H. 1946 Von Thiinen's Theory of Distribution and the Advent of Marginal Analysis. Journal of Political Economy 54:481-502. MARSHALL, ALFRED (1925) 1956 Memorials of Alfred Marshall. New York and London: Macmillan. -» Reprinted by Kelley in the "Reprints of Economic Classics." MELAMID, ALEXANDER 1955 Some Applications of Thiinen's Model in Regional Analysis of Economic Growth. Regional Science Association, Proceedings 1:L1—L5. MOORE, HENRY L. 1895 Von Thiinen's Theory of Natural Wages. Quarterly Journal of Economics 9:291304, 388-408. OHLIN, BERTIL G. 1935 Some Aspects of the Theory of Rent: Von Thiinen vs. Ricardo. Pages 171-183 in Economics, Sociology and the Modern World: Essays in Honor of T. N. Carver. Edited by Norman E. Himes. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. PETERSEN, ASMUS 1944 Thiinens isolierter Staat: Die Landwirtschaft als died der Volkswirtschaft. Berlin: Parey. PETERSEN, ASMUS 1959 Johann Heinrich v. Thiinen, Volume 10, pages 386-392 in Handworterbuch der Sozialwissenschaften. Stuttgart (Germany): Fischer. SCHNEIDER, ERICH 1934 Johann Heinrich von Thiinen. Econometrica 2:1-12. SCHUMACHER, H. 1868 Johann Heinrich von Thiinen: Ein Forscherleben. Rostock (Germany): Leopold. WICKSELL, KNUT (1901) 1951 Lectures on Political Economy. Volume 1: General Theory. London: Routledge. -» Translated from the third Swedish edition. See especially pages 216-217 on von Thiinen's theory of capital accumulation.
THURNWALD, RICHARD Richard Thurnwald (1869-1954), sociologist and anthropologist, was born in Vienna, the only son of a Viennese industrialist who came from a well-to-do farmer's family. After finishing the classical course at the Gymnasium and his required
military service, Thurnwald attended the University of Vienna. In the late nineteenth century, aspects of the social sciences were taught only in the faculty of law, so Thurnwald studied law, receiving his law degree and his state lawyer's certificate in 1894. Concurrently with his legal studies, he learned Turkish, Arabic, Russian, and Serbian. Also, he became acquainted with scholars in a variety of academic disciplines, among them the economic historian Max Schwiedland, the physical anthropologists R. Poch and A. Plotz, and several psychiatrists of the Zurich school. Perhaps most important for his scientific development were his contacts with the psychologist Karl Stumpf and with J. Kohler, a representative of the school of comparative law. While in Berlin from 1901 to 1905, he studied Egyptian under A. Erman and Assyrian under Fr. Delitzsch. Thurnwald's first and last field studies were conducted in Europe: the first in Bosnia in 1896, and the last in Berlin in 1946-1947. In between, he worked in Micronesia and the Solomon Islands, 1906-1909; New Guinea, 1912-1915; east Africa, 1930; and again in the Solomon Islands in 1932. From 1924 on, he held a position at the University of Berlin, mainly in anthropology and sociology, but he also taught at various American universities: the University of California, 1915-1917; Yale and Harvard, 1931-1932; and Syracuse University, 1949. He was the founder and editor of the Zeitschrift fur Volkerpsychologie und Soziologie (later Sociologus^) from 1925 on; one of the editors of the Archiv fur Anthropologie; and coeditor of the Zeitschrift fur vergleichende Rechtswissenschaft. Thurnwald's wide range of training and experience, combined with a lifelong interest in the natural sciences, made him critical of Wundt's Volkerpsychologie, the dominant anthropological theory in the first two decades of the twentieth century. In the late 1920s, he also became critical of Levy-Bruhl. Both these authors, he felt, lacked experience with non-Western societies, and their approach was nothing more than speculative. The French school of sociology, represented by Durkheim, suffered from the same fault, especially in their theories of the function of religion. In spite of his profound interest in comparative psychology, Thurnwald became a follower neither of Freud nor of Jung; and in spite of his commitment to comparative sociology, he rejected the Marxian school that was important in Berlin in the 1920s. In both cases, the paucity of supporting factual data made the theories unacceptable: Thurnwald regarded these unilinear schemes of development as a priori speculation. His line of
thinking did not fit, therefore, into the main stream of theory-oriented German social anthropology, and this explains the failure of the University of Berlin to create a regular chair for him despite his many years of successful teaching there. His own theories were based on the intimate knowledge of different societies that he gained on his many and long field trips. He may best be regarded as a functionalist who was fairly close to the British school of Malinowski, with the important difference that he never became antihistorical and that he always paid more attention to individual psychology than did the British school. His main functionalist ideas were formulated before those of the British school, but the British school appears to have developed the same ideas independently. Thurnwald did not develop a complete system or general theory of human development. He encouraged the comparison of social institutions in different societies; the differences that emerged would contribute to the understanding of the varying functions of a particular institution. He also compared the functional structure of societies, in order ultimately to establish historical developmental sequences. In explicit opposition to Max Weber's concept of "ideal types," which he regarded as purely speculative, Thurnwald tried in "Reprasentative Lebensbilder" (1931-1935, vol. 1) to identify specific societies as representative of types of societies. He complemented this "static" approach with the study of the dynamics of sociopsychological "situations," again trying to establish typical solutions to specific social problems, and typical sequences of situations. The individual's solution to a specific situation remained for Thurnwald the principal source of all social change. But although he was preoccupied with change, the idea of an equilibrium does lie behind his idea of a "typical society." Thurnwald regarded the prevailing level of technology as the main determinant of societal type. Technological change is a process involving the accumulation of objects and ideas, an irreversible process with respect to mankind, but not with respect to an individual social group. Technology and social structure are interdependent, yet the correlation between them is only one determinant of social development: the same technology can be used in different types of societies, and a new technology does not always change a society immediately, nor does it necessarily change different societies in the same way. The effect of technology on the type of economy is more nearly determinate;
indeed, a given technology largely determines the contemporaneous economy. Furthermore, the economic system has a high degree of influence on social organization. But since the economic system is also influenced by the social structure and since economic behavior is not entirely rational, the beginnings of social change, according to Thurnwald, lie primarily in the economic attitudes (Wirtschaftsgeist) of individuals rather than in the economic system. Thurnwald's idea of "superstratification" was a fruitful contribution to the field of political sociology. Processes of superstratification are typically different from those of stratification, for while stratification may be caused either by factors inside a society or by the conquest (military or other) of one society by another, superstratification results either from conquest or from the immigration into a stratified society of a new group which then occupies the lowest status positions (Unterwanderung'). The study of processes of superstratification led Thurnwald to examine the feudal system as well as states, cities, and kingship in their early stages of development. Another instance of superstratification is the colonial expansion of the West in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Thurnwald was the first German sociologist and one of the first in Europe to make special studies of processes of acculturation and adjustment in Africa. These studies, which he made with his wife, Hilde Thurnwald, avoided the "colonial ethnological" approach that influenced British anthropological thinking for some time. WOLFRAM EBERHARD [See
ANTHROPOLOGY, article on THE COMPARATIVE
METHOD IN ANTHROPOLOGY; ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY; and the biography of MALINOWSKI.] WORKS BY THURNWALD
1916
Bdnaro Society: Social Organization and Kinship System of a Tribe in the Interior of New Guinea. American Anthropological Association, Memoirs, Vol. 3, No. 4. Lancaster, Pa.: New Era. 1931-1935 Die menschliche Gesellschaft in ihren ethnosoziologischen Grundlagen. 5 vols. Berlin and Leipzig: de Gruyter. 1932& THURNWALD, RICHARD (editor) Soziologie von heute: Ein Symposion der Zeitschrift fur Volkerpsychologie und Soziologie. Leipzig: Hirschfeld. 1932& Economics in Primitive Communities. London: Oxford Univ. Press. 1935 Black and White in East Africa; The Fabric of a New Civilization: A Study of Social Contact and Adaptation of Life in East Africa. With a chapter on women by Hilde Thurnwald. London: Routledge. 1948 Aufbau und Sinn der Volkerwissenschaft. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Grundfragen menschlicher Gesellung: Ausgewdhlte Schriften. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1957.
22
THURSTONE, L. L. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
Beitrdge zur Gesellungs- und Volkerwissenschaft: Professor Dr. Richard Thurnwald zu seinem achtzigsten Geburtstag. 1950 Berlin: Mann. -» Contains a bibliography on pages 469-477. LOWIE, ROBERT H. 1937 The History of Ethnological Theory. New York: Farrar & Rinehart. -> See especially pages 242-249 on "Thurnwald." LOWIE, ROBERT H. 1954 Richard Thurnwald: 18691954. American Anthropologist New Series 56:863867.
THURSTONE, L. L. Louis Leon Thurstone (1887-1955), American psychometrician and psychologist, was born in Chicago. Both of his parents had been born in Sweden, and for a period Thurstone himself attended school in Stockholm. At Cornell University, which he entered in 1908, he first studied civil engineering but changed to electrical engineering. Even before graduating from college he patented a model motion-picture projector; it attracted the attention of Thomas A. Edison, who offered him an assistantship in his laboratory in East Orange, New Jersey. However, Thurstone did not remain long in Edison's laboratory, leaving in the fall of 1912 to teach descriptive geometry and drafting in the College of Engineering at the University of Minnesota. Thurstone's interest shifted to the experimental study of learning, and in the summer of 1914 he enrolled for graduate study in psychology at the University of Chicago. While still a graduate student he accepted an assistantship in Walter V. Bingham's newly established division of applied psychology at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. Thurstone continued at Carnegie after receiving his doctorate from Chicago, eventually becoming professor and chairman of the department of psychology. Early in 1923 Thurstone left Carnegie for Washington, to work for the foundation-supported Institute for Government Research and specifically to prepare instructional manuals and specimen materials that would assist civil-service agencies in using objective examinations. With the assistance of Thelma Gwinn, who became his wife in 1924, he prepared a psychological test for selecting or classifying college students; he and his wife were responsible for 24 successive annual editions of the American Council on Education Psychological Examinations. Thurstone returned to the University of Chicago in 1924, as associate professor of psychology, and taught courses in descriptive statistics and mentaltest theory. Three years later he became a full pro-
fessor, and in 1938 he was named Charles F. Grey distinguished service professor. He established the Psychometric Laboratory at Chicago, and after his retirement in 1952 he re-established his laboratory at the University of North Carolina, where he went as a research professor of psychology and as director of this laboratory. Although Thurstone credited others with the founding of the Psychometric Society and of its journal, Psychometrika, he was close to the nucleus of 10 or 12 persons who brought these into being in 1936 in order to foster the development of psychology as a quantitative rational science. Only a few of the many honors that Thurstone received can be mentioned here. He served as president of the American Psychological Association in 1932 and was the first president of the Psychometric Society (in 1936). He was elected honorary fellow of the British Psychological Society, the Spanish Psychological Society, and the Swedish Psychological Society. The University of Gb'teborg awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1954. Contributions to psychology Throughout his career in psychology, Thurstone was primarily concerned with the problem of measurement. He sought to establish valid principles of measurement in such areas as mental abilities, intelligence, attitudes, social judgment, psychophysics, and personality. Intelligence. Thurstone advanced the thesis that "Intelligence, considered as a mental trait, is the capacity to make impulses focal at their early, unfinished stage of formation" (1924, p. 159); that is, intelligence is "the capacity to live a trialand-error existence with alternatives that are as yet only incomplete conduct" (ibid., p. xv). In his early approaches, he regarded intelligence as an ability to abstract that involves the inhibition of immediate impulsive behavior and that opens up a number of alternate paths toward impulse satisfaction (need reduction or goal attainment). When abstraction does not occur, when awareness of impulse-driven behavior is limited, the organism is more likely to engage in behavior that is inappropriate to real impulse satisfaction (ibid., especially pp. 123-169). The area of mental abilities continued to absorb Thurstone. He took issue with the mental-age concept that had become so important to psychologists and educators. In 1926 he pointed out incisively that two different definitions of mental age were being used: one that infers mental age from the chronological age for which a specified test performance is average; and a second that infers
THURSTONE, L. L. mental age from the average chronological age of persons performing at a specific level. Thurstone demonstrated the inadequacy of both definitions for dealing with adult intelligence and suggested that test performance of children as well as of adults should be represented in terms of either percentile ranks or standard scores. Thurstone's later work on factor analysis (discussed below) bears directly on the study of mental abilities. In the late 1920s he began an analysis of the correlations between various types of aptitude tests. This area had already been investigated by both C. E. Spearman and E. L. Thorndike, who had come to quite different conclusions. Spearman claimed, as a result of his method of factor analysis, that there is a general factor "g" that characterizes all mental functioning, even though there are many additional specific, unique abilities (Spearman 1904; 1927). Thorndike took issue with Spearman's position and argued that intelligence is composed of a large number of separate factors or elements and that there is no general intelligence. Thurstone, using improved statistical techniques, arrived at a position somewhere between these two extremes. He claimed that performance on tests of cognitive abilities results from several factors rather than from one common general factor. After making several factor analyses, he identified a number of factors that he referred to as "primary mental abilities": spatial visualization, perceptual ability, verbal comprehension, numerical ability, memory, word fluency, and reasoning. He saw that some of these could be separated into two or more factors, depending upon the number of tests of the original factors introduced in new analyses and the nature of the specific variations incorporated in the tests. Thus when a number of tests of, for example, the spatial factor, first identified as a primary factor, are included in an analysis, additional or partitioned factors in the realm of space may be identified, as Thurstone was well aware. Noting that the primary factors are positively correlated, Thurstone suggested that a factor analysis of these correlations might reveal a "second-order factor," similar to Spearman's "g" (1948). Measurement theory and psychophysics. Various psychological scales then in use seemed to Thurstone to imply that distributions of scores for various age groups differ only with respect to the mean, and his first paper on measurement theory presented a scaling method that permits both the mean and the dispersion to vary (1925a). Thurstone approached the area of measurement vigorously. In one year, 1927, he published several
23
articles dealing with various problems of subjective measurement, introducing the concept of discriminal dispersion and the law of comparative judgment, and relating the law of comparative judgment to the classical psychophysics of Weber and Fechner (see 1927; Measurement of Values, pp. 19-81). He also issued a lithoprinted work, "The Reliability and Validity of Tests" (1931a). Further papers, first published between 1928 and 1932, dealt with the inconsistency of the phigamma hypothesis with Weber's law (Measurement of Values, pp. 82-91), the limitations of the method of equal-appearing intervals (ibid., pp. 9299), the method of rank order as a substitute for paired comparisons (ibid., pp. 100-111), and the numerical evaluation of the dispersions of stimuli presented by the constant method (ibid., pp. 112122). In 1931 Thurstone wrote an article that was based upon the postulate that motivation toward accumulation of a commodity is inversely proportional to the amount already possessed (ibid., pp. 123-144). At the University of North Carolina, where he went in 1952, he worked with Lyle V. Jones, with whom he had collaborated earlier, on the experimental determination of the zero point on a scale of utility; they demonstrated that subjective values are additive (ibid., pp. 195-210). In a 1945 paper, Thurstone had shown that the dispersion of affective values, as well as the average affective value of a proposal, is significant in the measurement of the social attitudes of a group (ibid., pp. 145-160). Even in the last years of his life Thurstone continued to investigate approaches to the measurement of subjective attributes. He developed a new scaling method that avoided the assumption of the normality of the subjective distribution for each stimulus. He also explored the less restrictive assumption that repeated judgments by the same individual will be normally distributed on the subjective continuum. A 1954 paper, "The Measurement of Values," reviewed fundamental concepts of subjective measurement (ibid., pp. 182-194). The measurement of attitudes. Perhaps the most popular application of Thurstone's work in subjective measurement is his contribution to the scaling of social attitudes. Although he recognized the inadequacy of methods of attitude measurement current in the 1920s, he held that, in principle, attitudes were subject to measurement. Thurstone had earlier, in 1928, advanced the notion of equal-appearing intervals for subjective measurement, and later he extended it to development of an attitude scale. "The scale is so constructed that
24
THURSTONE, L. L.
two opinions separated by a unit distance on the base line seem to differ as much in the attitude variable involved as any other two opinions . . . also separated by a unit distance" (Thurstone & Chave 1929, pp. xi-xii). Thurstone and Chave presented a series of 130 opinions about the church to 300 "judges" who were asked to arrange them in 11 piles ranging from extremely unfavorable to extremely favorable. An analysis of these judges' arrangements produced a final set of 45 items that had been rated relatively unambiguously and consistently and, most important, that represented a more or less uniformly graduated series of scale values. Subsequently, individual responses to this final opinion scale could be converted into meaningful scores and could be treated mathematically. The scale had internal reliability. Furthermore, on the basis of its ability to discriminate particular groups whose attitudes toward the church were assumed to be different, its validity was demonstrated. The uniqueness and importance of Thurstone's contribution to attitude scaling are still appreciated, as others continue to extend psychophysical methods to social phenomena that lack the simple scalable dimensions of physical stimuli. Multiple-factor analysis. Despite widespread interest in the application of attitude-measurement techniques to all sorts of issues and groups, Thurstone abandoned this field in the early 1930s to work on the development of multiple-factor analysis. Although later psychologists may place more emphasis upon Thurstone's contributions to psychophysics, his contemporaries probably paid more attention to his work in factor analysis. Thurstone was impatient with the debate on the merit of Spearman's single-factor method, the universality of a general factor, and the role of group factors. Instead of asking whether correlation coefficients support a general factor, he wondered how many factors must be postulated in order to account for observed correlations. The power of this approach lay in its ability to establish in the case of any particular study whether or not one factor should be regarded as general. Thurstone's excursions into multiple-factor analysis also embraced the concepts of communalities, rotation of the reference frame, oblique reference axes, and factorial invariance. The concept of simple structure—his solution to the problem presented by the infinite number of positions of reference axes—may well be his most noteworthy contribution to factor analysis. He was also concerned with second-order factors and with the effects of selection upon factorial structure.
Multiple-factor analysis was the subject of Thurstone's 1933 presidential address to the American Psychological Association, "The Vectors of Mind" (1934); he also wrote two major books on the subject (1935; 1947). He continued his work on factor analysis after he moved to North Carolina, and at about the same time that others began to work on this problem, he devised an analytical method of rotating the reference axes (1954). He also developed a new method of factor analysis designed to avoid the communality problem (1955). At the same time that he was refining the methodology of factor analysis, he was making important applications of the approach. His first large study entailed 57 tests of cognitive functions, administered to 240 subjects (1938). This research was followed by other studies, several of which were completed in his laboratory as student dissertations. An experimental battery of tests of primary mental abilities for use in schools was made available in 1938. In these and many other efforts, Thurstone was fortunate in having the collaboration of his wife. The study of personality. A recurrent interest of Thurstone's was the elusive realm of personality. He and his wife at one time developed a personality schedule patterned after Woodworth's questionnaire (1930). Returning to this earlier interest after World War n, he identified the psychological hypotheses implicit in such tests as the Rorschach and assembled more than sixty tests representing hypotheses concerning the manifestation of personality traits in performance on objective tests. A fairly short temperament schedule for use with normal persons resulted from factorial studies of personality questionnaires (1951). Although he himself did not pursue work in this field to its limits, Thurstone regarded objective laboratory tests of temperament as one of the most challenging areas of research. Thurstone not only contributed abundantly to the development of psychology but also exhibited a rare ability to capture the imagination of university colleagues and administrators, students, military leaders, industrialists, and the representatives of foundations. He had infinite skill in imparting ideas to others and inspiring them, too, to creative accomplishmen t. DOROTHY C. ADKINS [For the historical context of Thurstone's work, see the biographies of SPEARMAN; THORNDIKE; for discussion of the subsequent development of Thurstone's ideas, see APTITUDE TESTING; FACTOR ANALYSIS;
TIME: Psychological Aspects INTELLIGENCE AND INTELLIGENCE TESTING; PSYCHOMETRICS; PSYCHOPHYSICS; SCALING; and the biography of KELLEY.] WORKS BY THURSTONE The Nature of Intelligence. London: Routledge; New York: Harcourt. -» A paperback edition was published in 1960 by Littlefield. 1925a A Method of Scaling Psychological and Educational Tests. Journal of Educational Psychology 16: 433-451. (1925b) 1930 The Fundamentals of Statistics. New York: Macmillan. 1926 The Mental Age Concept. Psychological Review 33: 268-278. 1927 The Unit of Measurement in Educational Scales. Journal of Educational Psychology 18:505-524. 1928 The Absolute Zero in Intelligence Measurement. Psychological Review 35:175-197. (1929) 1937 THURSTONE, L. L.; and CHAVE, E. J. The Measurement of Attitude: A Psychophysical Method and Some Experiments With a Scale for Measuring Attitude Toward the Church. Univ. of Chicago Press. 1930 THURSTONE, L. L.; and THURSTONE, T. G. A Neurotic Inventory. Journal of Social Psychology 1:3—30. 1931a The Reliability and Validity of Tests. Unpublished manuscript, Ann Arbor, Mich. 1931b Multiple Factor Analysis. Psychological Review 38: 406-427. 1931c A Multiple Factor Study of Vocational Interests. Personnel Journal 10:198-205. 1934 The Vectors of Mind. Psychological Review 41:1-32. 1935 The Vectors of Mind: Multiple-factor Analysis for the Isolation of Primary Traits. Univ. of Chicago Press. 1938 Primary Mental Abilities. Psychomatic Monographs, No. 1. Univ. of Chicago Press. 1947 Multiple-factor Analysis: A Development and Expansion of The Vectors of Mind. Univ. of Chicago Press. 1948 Psychological Implications of Factor Analysis. American Psychologist 3:402-408. 1951 The Dimensions of Temperament. Psychometrika 16:11-20. 1954 An Analytical Method for Simple Structure. Psychometrika 19:173-182. 1955 A Method of Factoring Without Communalities. Pages 59-62 in Invitational Conference on Testing Problems, 1954, Proceedings. Princeton, N.J.: Educational Testing Service. The Measurement of Values. Univ. of Chicago Press, 1959. -» All the papers but one were first published between 1927 and 1955; the remaining one was completed by Lyle V. Jones and first published in this volume.
25
TIME i. PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS n. SOCIAL ORGANIZATION
Paul Fraisse Jack Goody
1924
SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY ADKINS, DOROTHY C. 1964 Louis Leon Thurstone: Creative Thinker, Dedicated Teacher, Eminent Psychologist. Pages 1—39 in Norman Frederiksen and Harold Gulliksen (editors), Contributions to Mathematical Psychology. New York: Holt. SPEARMAN, C. E. 1904 "General Intelligence" Objectively Determined and Measured. American Journal of Psychology 15:201-293. SPEARMAN, C. E. 1927 The Abilities of Man: Their Nature and Measurement. London: Macmillan.
PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS
Time is a dimension of our experience and our activity, but this dimension does not correspond to a simple physical reality. The concept of time is imposed on us by our experience of changes: the physicist and the biologist must introduce a parameter t to account for the evolution of natural phenomena. Analysis of our experience and the requirements of science show that two fundamental aspects must be distinguished in the concept of time: (a) the sequence, and more precisely, the order of the changes; (b) the duration of the changes or of the period between them. The interlocking of order and duration defines the process of the change. We experience a great number of series of changes that are apparently autonomous—time of the seasons, time of day and night, time of human life, time of activities, and so forth. History of the psychology of time. The psychology of time begins with Kant. Prior to him, the reality of time had not been questioned, even though philosophers disputed its nature. Kant declared that our notion of time is not imposed by a noumenal reality but by the activity of the mind: it is one of the forms of our sensibility. In the nineteenth century, in a departure from Kant's essentially rationalistic approach, men became concerned with the actual study of the sense of time and with perception of time, and no longer merely with the time of phenomena. A psychophysics of time was developed by comparing estimates of duration with the measurements given by chronometers. Henri Pieron, in 1923, was the first to define the psychology of time in a behaviorist framework, through the objective study of human behavior in relation to time. This point of view was developed by Pierre Janet (1928), who raised the question of our adaptation to time. Jean Piaget (1946) studied the development of the notion of time in the infant. Paul Fraisse (1957) provided a general analysis of temporal behavior. Temporal behavior. The psychology of time is defined by studying temporal behavior, i.e., by our adaptations, at first to the sequence and duration of changes and later to the multiplicity of changing series in which we live. These adaptations take place on two levels. The
26
TIME: Psychological Aspects
first is common to animals and man; through learning, activities become synchronous with series of changes. The second is peculiar to man, who is able to make symbols correspond to the various aspects of the changes. Society teaches these symbols to man, who uses them to represent the changes to himself, to orient himself within them, and also to control them. Adaptation to sequence and order Adaptation to sequence in conditioning. From the moment of their birth, organisms are subject to changes, and in particular, to their own internal changes. Stimuli precede the recurrence of needs and the means for satisfying them, which are reinforced by their reduction. Those stimuli that regularly precede need reduction become conditioned "signals." The organism then adapts to the sequence. The signals orient his activity toward the future. The infant smiles at the bottle at first, then at his mother preparing the bottle, and so forth. Some months later, he will cooperate in getting dressed, his movement anticipating the subsequent action. This Pavlovian type of conditioning is accompanied by an instrumental type of conditioning. The newborn child cries at annoyances in his first days, but he soon learns to make use of his crying to call for and evoke the action of others: he anticipates. At the age of about one year, the child adds to this behavior the act of designating what he wants by means of gestures and then by words. [See LEARNING, articles on CLASSICAL CONDITIONING and INSTRUMENTAL LEARNING.] Perception of sequence. To the physical sequence there corresponds a perceived sequence. The process of learning language reveals that the child is very soon able to repeat longer and longer ordered series of phonemes. This perception of an ordered sequence is spontaneous; it does not correspond to any superimposed contruction. Thus, it is always harder to repeat a series of digits in reversed order or in any order other than the one in which it was perceived. [See LANGUAGE, article on LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT.]
The natural organization of the sequence is facilitated if the stimuli are of the same nature. For example, if we are presented visually with three digits in succession and if at the same time we are presented audibly with three other digits, we can only reproduce these stimuli by first repeating the visual series and then the auditory one, or vice versa (Broadbent 1958). [See GESTALT THEORY.]
The lower limit for the perception of sequence depends on the inertia of the sensory receptors: it is 10 ms. for hearing and touch and 100 ms. for sight, if the stimulations occur at the same site (Pieron 1945). Trained subjects can perceive two sensations of the same or different natures (sound and light, for example) as a sequence when they are separated by an interval of only 20 ms. (Hirsh & Sherrick 1961); an interval of 60 ms. is necessary for untrained subjects (Hirsh & Fraisse 1964). [See HEARING; SENSES; SKIN SENSES AND KINESTHESIS; VISION.]
The upper limit of the perception of sequence in the case of two stimuli has been determined by using rhythmic forms. This limit is about two seconds (Fraisse 1956). Beyond that, the sequence is no more perceived but is constructed. Between these limits lies an optimum for the perception of sequence: an interval of about 600 ms. to 800 ms. This interval corresponds to that for spontaneous motor activity, to that for word association (Wundt [1873-1874] 1886, p. 322), to the spacing of the conditioned and unconditioned stimuli for optimal learning, to the time for which a series of two stimuli appears most natural, i.e., not too slow or too fast (Frischeisen-Kohler 1933), and to the time for which counting permits the most precise evaluation of the duration (Davis 1962). Complex sequences. Perception of sequence is easy when the stimuli belong to a single series of changes. It is no longer so when two orders of succession have to be discriminated. For example, if two runners stop successively but the one that stops first in time is the one that goes the shortest distance spatially, a child of five will confuse the spatial order and the temporal order of the stops (Piaget 1946, p. 90). Likewise, a child of five cannot organize two series of sequences experienced simultaneously, as for example the successive levels of liquid in a vase that is being emptied and the successive levels in another vase that is being filled at the same time (Piaget 1946, p. 7). The coordination of complex sequences implies logical constructions and operations, to use Piaget's vocabulary, that are possible for children only from age seven, approximately. [See DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY, especially the article on A THEORY OF DEVELOPMENT; INFANCY.]
Estimating duration Delayed conditioning. If a time interval separates the conditioned stimulus from the uncondi-
TIME: Psychological Aspects tioned stimulus, the conditioned reaction tends gradually to take place after an interval that is nearly equal to the interval between the two stimuli, as Pavlov showed as early as 1907. The conditioned reaction adapts to the duration, which acts as a second conditioned stimulus. The activity of the animal can also take duration into account in operant conditioning. A rat that is reinforced at regular intervals only begins to respond toward the end of the interval (Skinner 1938). He can even be trained to space two responses at a given interval (Sidman 1956). It should be emphasized, however, that delayed conditioning of a defensive reaction is hard to obtain, no doubt because the animal cannot control his reaction spontaneously except in the case of double avoidance (Ruch 1931). The relative length of a confinement in the first branch of a T maze can also be a signal for taking the left or the right path (Cowles & Finan 1941). Perception and estimation of duration. Man is able to estimate directly the duration of an event, with a precision that can be checked either by comparing two intervals or by reproducing the period. If perception is an immediate discrimination reaction to a present stimulus, it may be asked whether it is possible to speak of perception of a duration. The answer is positive. Within the limits of the psychological present (Fraisse 1957), we may assume that the duration of an event is "present" for several seconds. Within these limits there is an interval of indifference of 700 ms., corresponding to the optimum sequence. Shorter intervals are overestimated, longer intervals underestimated. Beyond a few seconds it is better to speak of estimation of time rather than of perception of it, since more complex processes, of which not too much is known, then enter into the picture. While there are certainly physiological recordings, e.g., from delayed conditionings, it is out of the question that the frequency of the heartbeat or the respiration should be direct factors, since no author has been able to find a correlation between these variables and the estimated duration. Undoubtedly, a central process is involved. This biological estimation depends on the general level of biological activity. Thus, in experiments with sensory deprivation, duration is greatly underestimated (Vernon & McGill 1963). Michel Siffre (1963), who lived in a completely dark cave, isolated from the world and without any timepiece, estimated his stay of 58 days as having lasted 33 days. Recent research on animals and human subjects
27
(Fraisse 1963) shows that in general, stimulants (mescaline, thyroxine, caffeine, amphetamine) cause an overestimation of time, and inhibitors (quinine, barbiturates) an underestimation. On this point, however, our knowledge is still rudimentary. Thus, many psychological variables alter the estimation of time. For durations of less than two seconds, the variability of reproduction is of the order of 10 per cent; for periods of several minutes, it rises to 20 to 30 per cent. Using the method of absolute judgments of duration, it is hardly possible to discriminate more than three stimuli, and the amount of information transmitted is less than two bits (Hawkes 1961). Psychological factors in estimating time. We know that we can make major errors in estimating durations. Two sets of variables have been studied in particular. The nature of the activity. Convergent results (Fraisse 1963) show that the more complex an activity is and the more it requires the attention of the subject, the shorter the time seems to be. Thus, copying a text or taking it down from dictation seems shorter than reading or listening (for equal objective durations of the activities). In the limiting case, during periods of inactivity duration seems very long. A complex activity appears to be short because in the course of it we note fewer changes than during a simpler activity. Again, a more complex activity is generally more interesting, and this brings up the influence of motivation. The influence of motivation. Whatever interests us seems to have a short duration, while what bores us seems interminable. Everybody has observed this law, which many experiments have confirmed. The best explanation of the phenomenon has been proposed by Katz (1906), who suggested that whenever attention is paid to the passage of time, the time seems to get longer. When we are bored, or waiting, or in a great hurry, time seems to go very slowly, because our attention is fixed on a number of changes, whereas an interesting activity absorbs us and puts us in a way "outside of time." [See ATTENTION.] Quantification and measurement of duration. The quantification, and, more precisely, the measurement of duration, must be distinguished from the over-all estimation of it. The units of these measurements are regular and "calibrated" changes —the ticks of a clock or metronome, the rotation of the earth, atomic clocks, and so forth. But man also makes use of the duration of changes whose
28
TIME: Psychological Aspects
durations are less regular and less precise—the length of the distance covered, the number of pieces produced, and so forth. Employing these units is not possible for the child until he has become able to perform intellectual operations, and not until adolescence is the duration of unit changes understood as independent of the concrete nature of the changes (Piaget 1946). Orientation in time Nychthemeral rhythm. We experience many changes simultaneously, some of them being periodic. The latter serve as points of reference, by means of which the others can be located. The nychthemeral rhythm is the most important for living organisms. It is a remarkable fact that this originally exogenous rhythm becomes endogenous. The entire rhythm of the organism—the rhythms of alimentary activity, of sleep, of the body temperature, and of all physiological functioning—has a cycle of 24 hours that persists for several weeks even if the animal or the man's ecological conditions change. We need only recall how tired we are made by an airplane trip that takes us across several time zones. This rhythmic activity turns our organism into a regular clock and gives us points of reference by which we can orient ourselves to the time of day. Thus Siffre, who lived 58 days in a cavern, had 57 periods of sleep and waking during that period, whereas he estimated the duration at 33 days. His physiological clock had been more accurate than his estimates. This transformation of exogenous rhythms into endogenous rhythms is an established fact, and Pavlovian conditioning provides an explanation of it. If a dog is fed every 30 minutes, it gradually reaches the point of starting to salivate only at the end of the 30-minute period (Feokritova 1912). Temporal orientation of man. Man spontaneously makes use of the temporal points of reference provided by his organism. We are conditioned to the rhythm of meals, sleep, and so forth. Even a mental defective is able to demand his meal at a set hour (James 1890, vol. 1, p. 623). But in addition, the infant and then the adult learn to orient themselves to other periodic changes, the most important of which are the changes of nature (the solar day, the year). Man also learns to employ more conventional points of reference, such as clocks, calendars, and so forth. The principle is always the same: to make
the experienced moment correspond to the phase of a periodic change that serves as the system of reference. The temporal horizon The temporal horizon of action. Merely as the result of conditioning due to the repetition of cycles of activity, present signals make reference to a future action. The present stimulus has a previously acquired significance, and it triggers an activity that anticipates some aspect of the future. These cycles are present in animals as well as in man, but because of second-order and higher-order conditioning their period is longer the higher the place that the organism occupies in the phylogenetic scale. The temporal horizon of man. Man too is conditioned by the cycles of his activity, and his temporal horizon always depends on them. The horizon of the day laborer is one thing, that of the professor is another. But, in addition, man is able to distinguish the present moment from what has been (the past) and what will be (the future). This ability is manifest from the youngest age at which the child is able to make adequate use of the adverbs of time (yesterday, tomorrow, and so forth) and the verb forms that refer to the past and the future. Thus we see the child's temporal horizon develop: from the age of 18 months on, he is situated between a recent past and a very immediate future. Little by little this horizon expands, as can be seen from the adequate use of adverbs of time and the localization of memories in the past and projects in the future. From the age of seven or eight on, this horizon extends beyond personal experiences. The child becomes interested in the background of his parents and in his country's history, and he becomes able to imagine future events that have not formed a part of previous cycles of his activity (his own marriage, for example). This development is to a very great extent a function of intelligence, which makes possible, in particular, better organization of the past and better anticipation of the future (Kastenbaum 1961). Temporal horizon and society. Past and future are made more precise by the learning of the society's language. Along with language, society transmits its representations of the past and the future. Some of these representations, linked to the great philosophies, are of great generality. Among the Greeks, for example, a circular representation of time predominated. The Christians
TIME: Psychological Aspects formed a continuous representation, starting from a creation ex nihilo down to the end of time. All men, in different degrees, use cyclical conceptions with respect to years, generations, civilization, or economic plans. More specifically, each social framework (family, profession, church, nation, and so forth) has its own way of seeing time, and, with Gurvitch (1958), we may speak of the multiplicity of social times. Certain societies, such as the Hopi Indians, hardly have a temporal horizon, if we are able to judge by their language, for their verbs have no tenses and they are said to be content with distinguishing "the earlier from the later" (Whorf 1950). In a given society, the temporal horizon appears to be fairly closely bound up with the cycle of experienced expectations and satisfactions. Every man has the capacity to evoke very distant pasts or futures, but in practice the horizon that has solidity and reality for him is narrowly linked to his way of life. The time of the peasant is one thing, and the time of the city dweller another. For example, it has been found that workers' children make up stories covering a shorter period of time than middle-class children (Leshan 1952). Finally, it should be kept in mind that every man belonging to several social groups has multiple temporal perspectives. He has to pass from one to the other—from family time to office time, for example—and try to bring them into accord (Halbwachs 1947). Thus, every man, depending on his temperament, his intelligence, and the forms of socialization that formed him, comes to have his own temporal horizon, defined in its extent and polarity, assigning value to either the past or the future, or even just the present (Fraisse 1957, p. 174). Individual differences in temporal horizons, of which little is as yet known, are clearly present in mental pathology and have been emphasized in studies of juvenile delinquents (Barndt & Johnson 1955). Mastery of time Tolerance of delay. It is possible to set up delayed conditioning in animals when the unconditioned stimulus provides positive reinforcement. It seems impossible to obtain this result in rats when the reinforcement is negative (avoiding an electric shock); but it does seem possible to obtain conditioning to time in dogs to whom an electric stimulus on the paw is given every five minutes [see Dmitriev & Kochigina 1955; see also LEARNING, article on AVOIDANCE LEARNING].
29
Children are greatly put out by the frustrations arising from the postponement of satisfaction. They are noticeably better able to stand delays as they grow older (Orsini & Fraisse 1957) and thus become able to prefer a reward that is greater, but delayed, to one that is smaller but immediate (Mischel & Metzner 1962). This progress appears to be linked on the one hand to development, education, and intelligence, and on the other, to emotional stability (Fraisse & Orsini 1955). Adolescents with emotional troubles react more impulsively to the stresses of the environment (Levine & Spivack 1959). Culture and the socioeconomic level (for the two are often linked) lead to the development of an appreciation of distant but valuable objectives and thereby of plans for organizing the future (Doob 1960). Maturity and culture make it possible to break free of the domination of the pleasure principle and to adjust better to the reality of time. The notion of time. Even when man is able to tolerate delays, he is enraged by irreversible changes. He finds relative security in conforming to the demands of society, whose pressure increases in proportion to the complexity of the network of social relations ("La pression temporelle" 1953); this is why the city dweller uses a watch more often than a farmer does. However, men seek to escape from the irreversibility of time by developing a notion of time that enables them to put the past and the future into the present. Cultivated men and societies like to set up memorials of their past in the forms of museums and archives and seek to survive their deaths by work that is as imperishable as possible. PAUL FRAISSE [See also DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY, article on A THEORY OF DEVELOPMENT; SLEEP. Other relevant material may be found in LANGUAGE, article on LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT; PERCEPTION; PsYCHOPHYSICS;
SENSORY AND MOTOR DEVELOPMENT.] BIBLIOGRAPHY ASCHOFF, JURGEN 1965 Circadian Rhythms in Man. Science 148:1427-1432. BARNDT, ROBERT J.; and JOHNSON, DONALD M. 1955 Time Orientation in Delinquents. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 51:343-345. BROADBENT, DONALD E. 1958 Perception and Communication. Oxford: Pergamon. COWLES, J. T.; and FIN AN, J. L. 1941 An Improved Method for Establishing Temporal Discrimination in White Rats. Journal of Psychology 11:335-342. DAVIS, R. 1962 Time Uncertainty and the Estimation of Time-intervals. Nature 195:311-312.
30
TIME: Social Organization
DMITRIEV, A. S.; and KOCHIGINA, A. M. (1955) 1959 The Importance of Time as a Stimulus of Conditioned Reflex Activity. Psychological Bulletin 56:106-132. -> First published in Russian. DOOB, LEONARD W. 1960 Becoming More Civilized: A Psychological Exploration. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. FEOKRITOVA, IULIIA P. 1912 Vremia kak uslovnyi vozbuditel' sliunnoi zhelezy (Time as a Conditioned Stimulus to the Salivary Gland). St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Shtaba Otdiel'nago Korpusa Zhandarmov. FRAISSE, PAUL, 1956 Les structures rhythmiques: Etude psychologique. Brussels: Erasmus; Univ. of Louvain. FRAISSE, PAUL (1957) 1963 The Psychology of Time. New York: Harper. -» First published in French. FRAISSE, PAUL 1963 Perception et estimation du temps. Pages 59-95 in Paul Fraisse (editor), Traite de psychologie experimental. Volume 6: La perception. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. FRAISSE, PAUL; and ORSINI, FRANCINE 1955 Etude experimentale des conduites temporelles. I: L'attente. Annee psychologique 55:27-39. FRANKENHAEUSER, MARIANNE 1959 Estimation of Time: An Experimental Study. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. FRISCHEISEN-KOHLER, I. 1933 Feststellung des weder langsamen noch schnellen (mittelmassigen) Tempos. Psychologische Forschung 18:291-298. GURVITCH, GEORGES 1958 Structures sociales et multiplicite des temps. Societe Francaise de Philosophie, Bulletin 52:99-142. -» Includes 26 pages of discussion and comments. HALBWACHS, MAURICE 1947 La memoire collective et le temps. Cahiers internationaux de sociologie 2:3-31. -» Published posthumously. HAWKES, GLENN R. 1961 Information Transmitted Via Electrical Cutaneous Stimulus Duration. Journal of Psychology 51:293-298. HIRSH, I.; and FRAISSE, PAUL 1964 Simultaneite et succession de stimuli heterogenes. Annee psychologique 64:1-19. HIRSH, IRA J.; and SHERRICK, CARL E., JR. 1961 Perceived Order in Different Sense Modalities. Journal of Experimental Psychology 62:423-432. JAMES, WILLIAM (1890) 1962 The Principles of Psychology. 2 vols. New York: Smith. JANET, PIERRE 1928 L'evolution de la memoire et la notion du temps. Paris: Chahine. KASTENBAUM, ROBERT 1961 The Dimensions of Future Time Perspective: An Experimental Analysis. Journal of General Psychology 65:203-218. KATZ, DAVID 1906 Experimentelle Beitrage zur Psychologie des Vergleichs im Gebiete des Zeitsinns. Zeitschrift filr Psychologic und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane. 1. Abteilung. Zeitschrift fur Psychologic 42: 302-340; 414-450. LESHAN, LAWRENCE L. 1952 Time Orientation and Social Class. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 47:589-592. LEVINE, MURRAY,- and SPIVACK, GEORGE 1959 Incentive, Time Conception and Self Control in a Group of Emotionally Disturbed Boys. Journal of Clinical Psychology 15:110-113. MISCHEL, WALTER; and METZNER, RALPH 1962 Preference for Delayed Reward as a Function of Age, Intelligence, and Length of Delay Interval. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 64:425-431.
ORSINI, FRANCINE; and FRAISSE, PAUL 1957 Etudes des conduites temporelles. II: Etude genetique de 1'attente. Annee psychologique 57:359-365. PIAGET, JEAN 1946 Le developpement de la notion de temps chez I'enfant. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. PIERON, HENRI 1923 Les problemes psychophysiologiques de la perception du temps. Annee psychologique 24:1-25. PIERON, HENRI (1945) 1952 The Sensations: Their Functions, Processes, and Mechanisms. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press; London: Miiller. -» First published as Aux sources de la connaissance: La sensation, guide de vie. La pression temporelle. 1953 Sondages 15, no. 3:1123. RUCH, FLOYD L. 1931 L'appreciation du temps chez le rat blanc. Annee psychologique 32:118-130. SIDMAN, MURRAY 1956 Time Discrimination and Behavioral Interaction in a Free Operant Situation. Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology 49:469473. SIFFRE, MICHEL 1963 Ears du temps. Paris: Juillard. SKINNER, B. F. 1938 The Behavior of Organisms: An Experimental Analysis. New York: Appleton. VERNON, JACK A.; and McGiLL, THOMAS E. 1963 Time Estimations During Sensory Deprivation. Journal of General Psychology 69:11-18. WALLACE, M.; and RABIN, A. I. 1960 Temporal Experience. Psychological Bulletin 57:213-236. WHORF, BENJAMIN L. 1950 An American Indian Model of the Universe. International Journal of American Linguistics 16:67-72. WUNDT, WILHELM (1873-1874)1886 Elements de psychologic physiologique. 2 vols. Paris: Alcan. -> First published in German as Grundziige der physiologischen Psychologic. Volume 1 was translated into English in 1905 as Principles of Physiological Psychology. II SOCIAL ORGANIZATION
Since all human activities occur in time, the existence of a social system necessitates some or ganization of time. Such organization entails : (1) systems of time measurement, based upor cosmic and human cycles; (2) the allocation and scheduling of time fr individuals; and (3) a set of attitudes toward time past, tirrn present, and time future. While many thinkers have been interested i] the basic categories of the understanding—time space, and so on—it was Durkheim's discussio: of this subject (1912) that laid the basis for moc ern social scientific treatments. Durkheim arguec developing Kant's view that the basic categorie of the understanding exist in the mind, that thes categories are not given a priori but are soci; constructs. It was Durkheim's observations th; encouraged other social scientists to study the w£
TIME: Social Organization in which cultural variations in concepts such as time and space are related to other aspects of social life (see, for example, Granet on China [1934]; Mauss on the Eskimo [1906]; EvansPritchard on the Nuer [1940]) as well as to the way children acquire concepts about time (see, for example, Piaget 1946). Not all societies have the equivalent of the category "time." Writing of the Nuer of the southern Sudan, Evans-Pritchard pointed out that for them the notion that we call "time" is not a separate idea but an integral part of social activities and of ecological and meteorological phenomena ([1940] 1963, pp. 104-108). Similarly, Bohannan has written of the Tiv of northern Nigeria: "Time is implicit in Tiv thought and speech, but it is not a category of it" (1953, p. 262). But if time is not necessarily an explicit category, it is always an aspect of experience, implicit in thought and speech. The experience of time takes two major forms—sequence and duration. From the standpoint of sequence, events are seen as located in a particular order along a moving continuum. The experience of duration derives from the relative span of events and of the intervals between them. The experience of time as a continuum is often compared metaphorically to the movement of water, sometimes the linear flow of a river, sometimes the cyclical ebb and flow of the ocean; indeed, the English word "time" has the same root as "tide." Although all societies have some system of time reckoning, some idea of sequence and duration, the mode of reckoning clearly varies with the economy, ecology, and technical equipment; with the ritual system; and with the political organization. A peasant system has little need of elaborate scheduling, nor does it always possess the mechanical devices that permit accurate measurement. In nonindustrial societies the repetitive patterns of human life and the world of nature provide the basic measures of time reckoning, the counters for verbalizing the experience of duration. These measures can be thought of in terms of two main cycles, the human and the cosmic. In each cycle the main points of significant change are marked by rites of passage. Sequence and duration, cyclical and linear patterns, and systems of reckoning occur in all human societies, but the emphases differ. The measurement of long periods of time (the chronology °f the historian) could hardly begin before the urban revolution, which brought with it writing a nd the possibility of elaborate calculations concerning the movement of the heavens. Strict chro-
31
nology began, according to Cumont (1912), with the establishment by the Chaldeans of a fixed era, the Era of Nabonassar, in 747 B.C. The introduction of such a base point for the calculation of years was essential to the prediction (and to some extent the recording) of long-term periodic phenomena, such as eclipses. The use of a base point represents a partial disengagement from cyclical concepts: years now pass irretrievably, never to return; time accumulates and no longer just ebbs and flows. This idea of irreversible time, much stressed in Judaeo-Christian thought, is central to the development of science and history alike. But such general changes in ideas as the shift from "the myth of the eternal recurrence" to the concept of linear, irreversible time are matters of degree rather than kind. Sacred (or liturgical) time, as distinct from profane time, continues to be largely dependent upon cyclical concepts; even the apocalypse, a thoroughly linear belief, is followed by rebirth into a timeless universe. We experience the events of our lives and the succession of the natural seasons in terms of both concepts; indeed, the attempt to erect long-term cycles continues to be a feature of the work of historians such as Spengler and Toynbee (although they tend to confuse the persistence of certain mechanisms with the repetition of specific events). The same is true of the concepts of sequence and duration: they do not change radically. In simple societies the beginning of a ceremony is often determined by a natural event, or, as in the Tallensi ritual chain, it follows the performance of a similar ceremony by a neighboring group (Fortes 1936). Time indications tend to give way to time measurement with the invention of new mechanical devices; but even modern man, reviewing his own experience, often thinks in terms of the sequence of events rather than attempting to locate them in an absolute chronology. The subjective time of the "inner dialogue" (what Meyerhoff calls "human time"), which forms one of the great concerns of Proust, Joyce, Mann, and Virginia Woolf, stands in contrast to the more rigid time reckoning required either by the social intercourse of urban society or by scientific endeavor; in the latter, I include the establishment of a chronology for historical reconstruction, as distinct from the personal recollection of past experience. Since concepts of time and its social organization are basic to the development of modern science and technology, which, in turn, underlies the rise of modern industrial society, to what extent do the variations in these concepts account
32
TIME: Social Organization
for differences in technological and industrial development? From the Chinese evidence, Needham has concluded (1965, p. 52) that differences in development cannot be attributed to concepts of time. These concepts vary only in degree and are not in themselves capable of preventing technological advance. Thus, in addition to the discrete cycles, the discontinuous "packaged" time of their general world outlook (Granet 1934), the Chinese also used the linear reckoning appropriate for historical narrative; both models were potentially available. It would appear that major changes in the concepts and organization of time follow rather than precede technological innovations. Measurement of time—the cosmic cycle The passage of time is calculated by reference to a series of repetitive units that are measured with varying degrees of precision. Certain of these units are based upon the movements of nature—the daily rotation of the earth, the regular phases of the moon, and the annual movement of the earth around the sun. The reckoning of days, months, and years occurs universally. But such units are not necessarily organized into an interlocking series, with one unit representing a specific fraction (or multiple) of another; instead, they may constitute a set of discontinuous time-indications. Night and day. Time reckoning begins with the recurrent division into night and day that commonly regulates activity levels in most forms of animal life. The division of human life into light and dark, movement and rest, and waking and sleeping often provides a symbolic framework for many other social activities. Night is generally seen as linked with evil, with witchcraft, and with illicit behavior of all kinds. It is the time for supernatural agencies to reveal themselves in dreams and for spirits of varied shapes and sizes to roam the earth. Night is also the time for sleep and sex, for dreaming and for thievery. To daytime belong the productive activities. In all societies, some division of the day is made according to the position of the sun in the sky; hence, concepts of dawn, forenoon, afternoon, and sunset, and the reckoning of time by the movement of light and shadow appear universally. Frequently, the periods of dawn and dusk, the times that call for a reorientation of activities from those of night to those of day, are further subdivided, and the terminology is refined. With the use of the sundial, the variation in the position of shadows can be formalized. Time reckoning thus moves in the direction of regular divisions of the night and the day into seconds, minutes, and hours, a
systematization that runs counter to the experience of the inhabitants of lands where there are seasonal differences in the length of daylight. Only with the development of mechanical devices can one divide night and day into equal units calculated against the rotation of the earth rather than on the basis of the length of sunlight. The precise divisions made by the clock are, of course, essential to any elaborate scheduling of the kind demanded by large-scale organizations like factories, offices, or communication systems. But the desire for more accurate time measurement long antedates the industrial revolution and relates to economic, ritual, military, and political needs. The sundial (or gnomon), the sandglass, and the clepsydra (or dripping water clock) were invented in Babylonia and Egypt, from whence they spread throughout the Old World. The oldest Egyptian water clock, graduated to show the lengths of hours at different seasons, dated from about 1500 B.C., and such instruments were further developed in Alexandria, in the Arabic world, and in Europe. The duties of the keeper of the clock are frequently mentioned in the rule books of monastic orders such as the Cistercians and included nightly adjustments according to observations of the stars. From the Fertile Crescent, sundials and watei clocks also spread to China. Lacking Euclidear deductive geometry, the Chinese never achievec the complexity of Arabic and western gnomonics But the water clock evolved much further into i complex hydromechanical instrument, and by 721: the Chinese had succeeded in controlling the rota tion of the water wheel by means of an "escape ment" of linkwork, which operated a kind of gate "Steady motion was thus secured by intersectin the progress of a powered machine into interval of equal duration—an invention of genius" (Neec ham 1965, p. 18). Whether or not this invention was the forerui ner of the purely mechanical clock is uncertaii But by the mid-fourteenth century the techniciar of western Europe had produced a weight-drive chronometer that depended upon a verge-and-foli< escapement to regulate its movement. From tf time of Archimedes, men had constructed m chanical models of the planetary orbits, and mo of the first clocks were "less chronometers tht exhibitions of the pattern of the cosmos"; the origin lay "in a complex realm of monument planetaria, equatoria, and geared astrolabe (White 1962, pp. 122-123). Indeed, the clock h been described as a machine to emulate the rotati of the earth.
TIME: Social Organization Coincident with the invention of such a clock, the temporary, or variable, hour, which had been favored for liturgical purposes, finally gave way to the system of equal hours. The division of the day into 12 hours, based upon the duodecimal system of the zodiac, was established in ancient Greece. About the middle of the fourteenth century it became usual to divide the hour into 60 minutes and the minute into 60 seconds. The measurement of time was now removed from the context of events; its divisions were given an abstract framework, and its reckoning became increasingly dissociated from immediate human experiences, shifting from the sun or tides to the formal divisions engraved on the face of a mechanical device. The next century saw the adaptation and use of the spring mechanism in clocks and later in watches. The new instrument was quickly taken up by the rich, particularly by the merchants, who had discovered, as Benjamin Franklin later said, that "time is money." "To become 'as regular as clockwork' was the bourgeois ideal, and to own a watch was for long a definite symbol of success" (Mumford 1934, p. 16). About the middle of the nineteenth century, the production of the cheap standardized watch, first in Geneva and then in America, made possible the wide use by individuals of devices for accurate, precise, and continuous time scheduling, as distinct from the communal (and less flexible) timekeeping of the muezzin's call, the village drum, the church bell, and the town-hall clock. In itself the clock is a technological achievement, but it also underlies four major aspects of modern life. First, it has made possible the precise measurement of time, which is perhaps the most fundamental operation in modern physics. Second, its manufacture has helped to train the craftsmen needed for further scientific endeavor, pure and applied. Third, it has provided a mechanical model for the operation of the universe. Fourth, it has permitted the detailed organization of time that an industrial system requires. In these ways, it has changed man's attitudes and his categories of time, and, therefore, it has been called the key machine of the modern world, surpassing in importance the steam engine itself. While accurate time measurement is a prerequisite of the complex social systems that mark industrial economies and of the scientific research on which they are based, earlier methods of timekeeping seem to have been stimulated by magical and religious concern as much as by pragmatic interests. Knowledge of the movements of the stars, although used for predicting seasonal changes and
33
for determining direction, was often required for divinatory purposes. The Chaldean-derived horoscope consisted of observations of the configuration of the planets at a certain moment; the chosen time for the calculation was usually the moment of birth, which was believed to shape the individual's whole destiny. Astrology represents the most elaborate form of divinatory technique; it exists only in conjunction with writing, but it is based also upon a widespread belief, apparent in the giving of day-names and similar practices, that men's character and destiny are determined by the date of their birth. The measurement of hours, by sundial and by sand, by candle and by clock, was an ecclesiastical demand, and so too were ideas of punctuality. Members of the "regular" clergy of the medieval monastery were enjoined to organize their lives "by rule," that is, by a specific allocation of time for work, for sleep, and for worship. The ringing of the prayer bell seven times a day established time by recourse to instruments that divided the day into regular intervals. It was this rigid organization of time, combined with the intense devotion to work, that has led scholars to include the Benedictine order among the founders of modern capitalism. Other world religions developed their own diurnal ordering of time. Followers of Islam, for example, are required to offer the five canonical prayers (saldt) at fixed times during the course of the day. In practice, working people tend to restrict their devotions, leaving the full observances to clerics and to the retired, who are able to give their whole lives to the accumulation of religious grace. The working population concentrates upon the evening prayer, which carries the greatest weight; as in Judaism, it is the setting rather than the rising of the sun that initiates the daily cycle. The week. The week lacks any definite basis in the external environment. It is an entirely social construct, varying in length from society to society: seven days in the Judaeo-Christian world and three, four, five, or six days in certain parts of west Africa, southeast Asia, and Central America. In early Rome it was eight days; in China it was ten. However, the weekly cycle always consists of a relatively small number of days (usually named) and is used to regulate short-term, recurrent activities, especially those of the market place. In Mesopotamia the seven-day period was linked to the five planets, together with the sun and the moon, in a planetary or astrological week. The seven-day week spread through Europe, north Africa, India, and the Malay Peninsula and is used
34
TIME: Social Organization
more or less universally today; present names continue to indicate the pre-Christian origin. The LoDagaa, a primarily agricultural society of northern Ghana, designate the six days of the week by the name of the village where a market takes place on the day in question. The very terms for "day" and "market" are the same (daa), and the weekly cycle is simply daar, "a plurality of markets," so that the names of the days not only record the pattern of market gatherings but also serve as a measuring rod for other short-range activities. The importance of market time is again illustrated in early medieval England, where each neighboring town held its market, or cheaping (hence "cheap"), on a different day of the week. The inhabitants of outlying districts would come in for the local trade and also for the opportunity of meeting together, so that disputes could be settled, marriages arranged, and leisure enjoyed. Thus, in many peasant societies the market week is a way of organizing social time as well as economic exchange. The weekly cycle of markets differentiates one day from another and serves to break up the continuity of agricultural activities by providing some change of pace—substituting rest for work, exchange for production. In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, there is also a weekly shift from the profane to the sacred, for a special day is allocated for religious activity. In Islam this day is Friday, in Judaism Saturday, and in Christianity Sunday. These calendrical differences reflect distinctions of theology and organization. In Islam, Friday is the day for worship at the town's main mosque, often with elaborate processions, but it is not a rest day in the full sense of the word; indeed, there is a maxim to the effect that it is blameworthy to abstain from work on Friday in imitation of the sabbath practices of Christians and Jews (Trimingham 1959, p. 73). The polytheistic religions of west Africa also have their day of rest, which sometimes coincides with the market day. Thomas suggested (1924, p. 199) that in west Africa, while the basis of the week is economic, the rest day is religious in origin; the days are usually named after markets, but sometimes after the gods worshiped on those days. Among the LoDagaa, one day each week is set aside as a "day of not using the hoe," when iron implements are forbidden. It is on this day that important sacrifices are made to the Earth shrine, under whose aegis all major uses of the soil, housebuilding, farming, burial, and ironwork are undertaken. Although modern industrial systems place a
great premium upon the continuous use of industrial facilities, the day of rest is found even in those societies where its role as a day of worship has been abandoned. In the Soviet Union a continuous workweek was introduced in 1929, and each worker was given one day off in five. The result was considerable chaos, in the home as well as at work. Two years later a six-day week with a common day of rest was instituted on the grounds that the shifting five-day schedule encouraged irresponsibility with respect to jobs and employment (Moore 1963, p. 122). In 1940 the seven-day week was restored, with Sunday as the day of rest. The double functions of the week of providing discontinuity in work and time for leisure seem to be even more necessary in an industrialized society than in a purely agricultural one, where seasonal changes impress their rhythms on the productive process. Moreover, there are strong pressures for the weekly break to be held in common: since individuals spend the bulk of their day in specialized work groups, family and neighborhood groups would be of only peripheral importance if they did not have the week end as a focus for joint activities. In the absence of effective crosscutting ties, overwhelming stress would be placed upon the monolithic economic institutions, and this could result in both emotional and cultural impoverishment. The month and the year. While itself consisting of a specified number of days, the week is rarely a subdivision of larger units of time measurement. The next unit in size, and one which is given universal recognition in some form or other, is the month, based upon the lunar cycle of 29.5 days. In nonliterate societies the month is calculated by direct reference to the waxing and waning of the moon, and special attention is paid to the three days of its death and rebirth, which are often seen as having a profound meaning for human life, being linked to ideas of immortality, death, and resurrection. Unlike weeks, months are usually thought of as organized segments of a seasonal cycle, although some societies use names only for certain of the lunar divisions. Nevertheless, all societies recognize some kind of yearly cycle, since this is required by both agriculture and hunting. Agriculture in particular demands an annual scheduling that determines the allocation of work and of food as well as the setting aside of seed at harvest time to be preserved until the next planting season. No society can avoid some long-term budgeting of this kind; the tropical paradise where wild fruits offer a natural superabundance of food and drink is a figment of the imagination of urban Europeans.
TIME: Social Organization Nobody, in fact, just passes the time, although it often seems so to those dependent upon more demanding schedules. There are, of course, outstanding differences in the degree of accuracy required by different schedules. While the weekly markets of medieval England catered to the local trade, there also existed the yearly fairs, or gearmarkets, to which traders came from far afield. The tolls for these fairs were often allocated to various eccelesiastical foundations, and the specific day on which the market took place was sometimes the saint's day of the religious house, so that the fair doubled as a fete and the traders as pilgrims. An activity of this kind that brings people together from widely separated places at a specific time of the year clearly requires a more accurate calculus than is provided by a simple count of moons, loosely linked to a seasonal cycle. It demands a calendar (or natural occurrence) that is accurate, regular, and widely known, so that precise coordination on an annual basis is possible. One difficulty in constructing such a system is that no sum of lunar months adds up to a yearly cycle. Intercalation is necessary in order to reconcile the year of 12 lunar months with the solar year on which the growth of crops depends. In the usual practice, no fixed number of days is assigned to the lunar month (in Islamic practice, for example, it begins when the new moon is seen), and likewise the year is considered to begin when the appropriate season comes round, the length of the months being adjusted accordingly. Thus, the harvest moon comes when the harvest is ready, and the planting moon is set by some biological clock, some natural phenomena, or what Linnaeus called the Horologe or "Watch of Flora." The abandonment of the lunar cycle results in a nonlunar month, or mense, under which term can be included any unit greater than ten days and less than a year (Thomas 1924, p. 188). For example, the Ashanti have the adae, a period of 42 days that is formed by the intersection of a six-day and seven-day weekly cycle, the first of local origin, the second probably of Muslim derivation. Both the great adae, which occurs after 18 days, and the little adae, which takes place after a further 24 days, were occasions for important sacrifices to the royal ancestors. As with the lunar reckoning of Islam, the adae (although unnamed) provides a continuous-chain type of calendar, divorced from the seasonal cycle but linked to a complex series of politico—religious festivals. The necessity for a closer "fit" between lunar months and solar years came only with the introduction of written calendars, which eventually
35
led to the abandonment of the lunar month, as in the Julian calendar, or to the relinquishing of the solar year, as in the Islamic system established by Muhammad (where the year of 12 lunar months is ten days shorter than the solar year). Historically, the first breakthrough toward the Western system appears to have been made in Egypt, which established a year of 12 nonlunar months, each with 30 days. Writing permitted a further important formalization of the calendar. In nonliterate societies the accumulation of years takes place, if at all, against a background of regular ceremonies, which may occur every three, seven, or ten years (or occasionally more, as in the case of the 60-year cycle of the Dogon festivals). In early literate societies there was sometimes a set of names for the years, for example, the Year of the Mouse (China) and the Year of Moses (Islam). In ancient Greece, with its annual transfer of power, the years were known by the name of the particular archon. But monarchic systems often reckoned years from the beginning of a reign, and such regnal counts could also be made by the cutting of tallies, the counting of pebbles, or the tying of knots. In Sumeria (as elsewhere), the regnal system of reckoning years was associated with the idea that a new ruler brings with him a new dispensation, a theme of renewal that serves, like regular elections, to reconcile individuals to the gap between expectation and actuality. Similarly, the revolutionary regimes of eighteenth-century France and fascist Italy reckoned the beginning of a new era from the date of their coming to power. Time itself is seen as making a fresh start, the social order as being reborn. The idea of an era depends upon the introduction of a fixed point at which numbering may start. Large-scale time is then no longer reckoned only by cycles or by recurrent series of occurrences; it acquires a more linear character. The fixed point used by the Chaldeans was arbitrary, but later such fixed points were calculated with reference to a unique event—the creation of the world or the birth of the prophet. Time is no longer experienced as largely repetitive (Gluckman 1963) but is seen as flowing in a single line (called variously "progress," "evolution," or "change") and, at the beginning of this shift in viewpoint, often in a chiliastic direction, toward an earthly millennium, the coming of a messiah; thus, certain years of the era, such as 1000, are invested with mystical properties. The early formalization and elaboration of written calendars took place under a variety of pressures: the demands of agricultural planning.
36
TIME: Social Organization
particularly in complex irrigation societies; the organization of trade, especially long-distance trade; and the coordination of the military and administrative activities of centralized polities. But as in nonliterate societies, magico-religious factors continued to be of prime importance in the arrangement and elaboration of the calendar, which mapped out the liturgical year as well as the economic year. Writing also made possible the recording of star positions and the development of mathematics, which were essential for the development of the horoscope as a means of forecasting future events and ascertaining divine will. Astrological and astronomical calculation always had much in common, and the mapping of the heavenly universe was important not only for divination but also for the development of chronometers and for navigation. One factor that inhibited navigation was the existence of purely local systems of time reckoning, and the development of a world-wide network of communications has inevitably led to the adoption of a unified calculus. Sun time, which varies by one minute every eight miles, had to give way to conventional time belts, which were established in the United States around 1880 at the instigation of the transcontinental railroads. Some years later a world congress completed the standardization of time that had begun with the founding of the Greenwich observatory two hundred years before and that led to the coordination of ships' chronometers with Greenwich mean time. Human action could now be synchronized on a world-wide scale. Systems of time reckoning have developed from concrete time indications of a discontinuous kind to increasingly abstract, numerical, and regular divisions linked to a continuous calendar based primarily on diurnal and annual movements. Through the means of writing, astronomy, and mechanics, there occurs an increasing dissociation of time measurement from commonplace events —the movement of animals, the growth of crops, and the human activities to which they are directly linked. Thus, there emerges a formal framework of objective divisions that are as applicable in Delhi as they are in Dallas. But the development of more abstract time scales tends to supplement rather than replace more concrete ideas of time, which often continue to be the measure for much subjective experience. Rites of passage in the cosmic cycle. For many social purposes, time is reckoned not by regular units of measurement but by the major festivals that break up the continuity of its passage ("Only 42 more shopping days to Christmas"). Such hol-
idays and festivals may be linked to any of the major time divisions—to days, weeks, months, or years. In England, the week revolves around its "holy day" and has its regular days for pay, sport, and rest. These regular days dominate patterns of food consumption (the Sunday roast) and of family interaction, as well as the whole industrial system; however, I am here concerned with the annual festivals that have a marked influence on the longrange planning of human activities. In agricultural communities, where productive activity is periodic, the major festivals of local religions tend to mark the beginning and end of the productive season. At the time of planting a rogation ceremony is often performed to obtain supernatural blessing for the growing crops; at harvest time a thanksgiving festival is held to acknowledge divine intervention in the productive process. In northern climes, where agriculture is much affected by the changing length of days and is influenced more by variations in sunshine than by the coming of the rains, ceremonies often cluster around the times of solstice and equinox, the major turning points of the solar year. Annual festivals, although mainly religious in orientation, have other consequences, intended and unintended. In tribal societies annual gatherings, such as the Australian corroboree, are important for the initiation of adolescents, the re-enactment of myths, and the restatement of cultural values. In addition, they provide a meeting point for persons of neighboring social groups, who not only participate in communal rituals but also use the occasion for settling disputes, getting brides, repaying debts, and generally regulating their affairs. Such events are often marked by a limited expression of tensions between groups, although the likelihood of overt conflict is inhibited by ritual peace, supported by special sanctions against the outbreak of violence (Fortes 1936). In Islamic countries the month of the pilgrimage (Dhu 'l-hijja) is sandwiched between two months during which raiding is prohibited, thus encouraging a ritual peace for the business and religious activities of the pilgrims. In state systems, festivals such as the Ashanti Odwira, the Hausa Gani, or the damba of northern Ghana are used to affirm political allegiance; on these occasions subordinate chiefs come to the capital to do public obeisance to their liege lords. Again, these occasions may also allow for the limited expression of conflict in rituals of rebellion directed against those in authority (Gluckman 1954). As religious festivals, these ceremonies are ob
TIME: Social Organization viously affected by changes in the beliefs of the participants. But often new cults that arise are forced to incorporate features from earlier rituals into their own because of the powerful hold of the traditional rites; indeed, the early Christians adopted Roman rituals to such an extent that Faustus, the Manichaean bishop, tried to convince the young Augustine that they were nothing better than idolaters. Whereas the major ceremonies of local religions usually celebrate the birth and death of the year (sometimes represented by the life cycle of a god), the main rituals of the prophetic religions enact the life and death of their founder, whose life cycle is encapsulated in the yearly calendar. The freedom from particular seasonal rhythms makes such calendars more appropriate for the world religions, whose adherents span many environments, and more appropriate also for urban communities, whose way of life is not governed by climatic changes. Such a liturgical calendar represents a further step in the dissociation of objective time reckoning from immediate human activities. Increasing secularism has meant that the political value of regular festivals has been openly acknowledged; the anniversaries of a nation's birth are celebrated with the same pomp and circumstance found in public demonstrations of loyalty to leader, state, and party. But while most ceremonies have a particular religious or national significance, the increased interaction between nations is producing a basic standardization of ceremonial time, a universal ritual calendar. The seven-day week is now world-wide, and, with the exception of a few Arab states of the Middle East, so too is the Sunday break; the post-Independence changes in Ceylon, which introduced a shifting weekly holiday (poya*) based upon the lunar calculation of the Buddhists, were inspired by political motives and seem unlikely to last. The most widespread public holiday is the first of January, the beginning of the Gregorian year, closely followed in popularity by Christmas and May Day. Despite the predominantly secularized character of the modern festival, a few groups reject the celebration of Christmas on religious grounds, but gift giving is often shifted to a nearby occasion—to Hanukkah among Jewish minorities and to New Year's Day in the European communist states. In some countries the first of May, the day on which the labor movement traditionally shows its strength, is celebrated as a holiday, but under certain right-wing regimes, as in Spain, all public manifestations of the holiday are banned, although this very denial has added to its value as a day
37
of protest. In most of the new nations the day is celebrated as one of solidarity and exhortation to increased national effort. In this case, the element of protest has been transferred from inside the social system to external targets, especially to the "neocolonial" activities of the major European powers. The number of bank holidays provides a rough scale of the degree of national "puritanism": Roman Catholic countries have the most, Protestant ones fewer, and the communist states fewest of all; Brazil has 18, Britain 6, and Bulgaria 5. New nations display an eclectic choice that reflects their political situation, ideological tenets, and religious composition: Ceylon, for example, recognizes Christian, Muslim, and Buddhist festivals, together with May Day, Independence Day, and a few other holidays, making a total of 15. Measurement of time—the human cycle Objectively, the passage of time in both the cosmic and human cycles is measured by the units already described—days, weeks, months, and years. But just as the year is divided into seasons that broadly characterize its main phases, so too the life span of human beings is divided into such categories as infancy, adolescence, and adulthood. The movement of an individual from one age grade to another is often celebrated by a rite of passage. In some societies these stages of growth form the basis of social groups of coevals, and in others a continuing series of such groups (age sets) is linked in an over-all age organization, which may serve important political and military functions. In modern nation-states, age-determined groups are the basis of educational organization, of informal associations of adolescents, and often of military recruitment, but they are of little importance in later phases of the life cycle. The position of an individual in the life cycle not only influences the role he plays and the groups to which he belongs but also has a number of less obvious effects on his behavior. The composition of the unit around which his domestic life revolves inevitably changes radically over time. One consequence of this fact for sociologists is that the "average family" can never be directly derived from a synchronic census but must be seen in dynamic perspective, that is, in terms of the developmental cycle (Fortes 1958). This approach not only illuminates residential patterns and divorce statistics but also is important in analyzing changing attitudes and beliefs. Durkheim, for example, demonstrated the inverse correlation between suicide rates and family integration, while Argyle (1958)
38
TIME: Social Organization
showed the link between age and religious commitment, the latter being highest at 18, dropping to a nadir at 30, and gradually increasing in strength the nearer the prospect of death. Clearly, an individual's perception of the social universe changes as his relationships with the living shift: the child defers to his elders, while the adult is deferred to. Rites of passage in the human cycle. The major changes in an individual's life are marked by rites of passage which announce and enact the acquisition of a new role, of new rights and duties. Thus, birth is usually followed by baptism, marriage rites celebrate the establishment of an enduring sexual union, and death is accompanied by elaborate funeral ceremonies that serve to dissociate an individual from his network of mundane relations and dispatch him to the world of the dead. In preindustrial societies funerals are usually the most important of the life-cycle ceremonies, since they have to accomplish the transfer of a man's rights and duties, especially over property, women, and office, to other members of the community; this process is necessarily gradual and hence often marked by a double funeral, the first stage of which is a burial service and the second a kind of memorial (Hertz 1907; Goody 1962). Ceremonies accompanying such distributions are particularly important in agricultural societies, where the volume of fixed and enduring property transmitted by kinship succession is high and where the ceremonies themselves often have integrative and cathartic functions for the local group. In urban industrial communities, where neighborhood and kinship ties are weak, where property inheritance is of more limited significance (since most people cannot bequeath the means of production), such ceremonies tend to become more perfunctory, especially as literacy permits the witnessing function of these rites to be accomplished by the issuing of licenses. But marriage, which involves the expression of intent by the participants, is still a significant public display in many industrial communities; birth continues to be the focus of important ceremonies among people of property; and the funeral complex (including published obituaries) often takes a highly elaborate form in the case of those who have done the state some service. The burial of great men performs an integrative function on a national level, restating the values the society holds dear and recalling the specific contributions made by other former citizens. The allocation of time Members of all societies have to make some allocation of the time to be spent on any one activ-
ity as against any other. In simple economies the basic allocation is closely linked to nature, being dominated by diurnal and seasonal rhythms. More accurate and more complex scheduling goes hand in hand with an increasing complexity of organization. It is made possible first by the development of writing, then by the invention of mechanical time keeping, and finally by the democratization of literacy through paper and the printing press. Time allocation, like other bureaucratic operations, can be removed from the uncertain sphere of memory and attached to objects in the outside world—"Make a note of that," "Put that in writing." But it is above all the watch that dominates the organization of time in modern societies. While radio signals, the factory siren, and the town-hall clock establish public time, the increasingly complex schedules of contemporary life are made possible by the mass-produced watch, a personal time keeper that individuals consult with the obsessive regularity of the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. The coordination of joint activities, whether over large distances or within complex organizations, requires that each individual make precise measurements: army orders for the movement of troops may end with the synchronization of watches, and civilians display the same concern about being "on time." The watch is often a man's first major gift to his adolescent son, a stimulus to adopt the adult virtue of punctuality, an emblem of approaching responsibilities. Since many of the operations of industrial life occur at regular intervals, people are able to routinize their behavior and so reduce the strain of organizing schedules and making decisions. In the commuter's life (the epitome of routinized time allocation), the pattern is largely imposed from the outside, by factory, train, and office. However, elaborate scheduling also spills over into leisure hours; many individuals have regular times for washing the car, for going on walks, and for entertaining guests, and in this way themselves impose an order on these potentially less structured situations. As Mumford has pointed out, such regimentation was both essential to and the product of the rise of capitalism: "The new bourgeoisie, in counting house and shop, reduced life to a careful, uninterrupted routine: so long for business: so long for dinner: so long for pleasure—all carefully measured out, as methodical as the sexual intercourse of Tristram Shandy's father, which coincided, symbolically, with the monthly winding of the clock. Timed payments: timed contracts: timed
TIME: Social Organization work: timed meals: from this period on nothing was quite free from the stamp of the calendar or the clock. Waste of time became for protestant religious preachers, like Richard Baxter, one of the most heinous sins" ([1934] 1964, p. 42). Mechanical devices (like writing) can make for easier manipulation of time categories; when schedules are linked with natural events such as the budding of trees, they are less easy to adapt to innovations such as new crops. At the same time, these devices enabled man to accelerate the pace of life to fit more activities into the day. A major development in late medieval technology was the control of power, and increasing power quickened the tempo of social life. Production and transport were speeded up, and in this century the concern with speed has even affected sport; the stop watch became the tool of the athletic coach as well as of the time-motion study experts. Because the diversity of an individual's roles is so often tied to particular places, such as shop, clinic, or office, it demands very specific allotments of time. A man or woman at work has to meet a more exacting schedule than does a housewife, whose routine turns upon the husband's employment and the children's school. Economic and domestic roles are segregated in time and space; and to take on any additional ("voluntary") roles, such as that of local councilor, party chairman, or committee member, means a further careful allocation of this scarce commodity, since each one necessitates a whole set of timed appearances. In societies that lack a complex division of labor, the role structure is more homogeneous in that during their lives most people fill most roles and in that the activities themselves rarely involve so great a separation in space and time. The more elaborate the division of labor and the less ascriptive the recruitment to roles, the greater are the number of possible role opportunities open to the individual. Selection among these alternatives is a matter of allocating time over the whole span of a person's life, and adults speak feelingly of "the wasted years" or of "having their time over again," sentiments likely to be less important in undifferentiated communities, where a new life would tend to be much like the old. In Hindu society, which, although differentiated, is still based on the ascription of roles, movement through the role structure is left to future incarnations and depends upon an individual's performance in his existing status. Such an eschatology provides the possibility of future mobility as a compensation for the unchangeable present. "Career scheduling" involves choices on the part
39
of both the senior and junior generations that often entail consideration of comparative rewards over the long term. Lengthy career training means the postponement of gratification in money, sex, and independence. The ability to carry out such a program derives from professional interest, the attraction of greater rewards, and the pressures of parents and peers; it is also supported by moral factors, such as the commitment to the Protestant ethic. The higher the desired status and the more complex the economy, the longer the time perspective needed to attain one's ends. On a national scale, there is a parallel problem concerning the restriction of immediate spending in the interests of investment. The running of any economy, whether socialist, capitalist, or mixed, requires a deliberate consideration of present action in the light of future needs. Attitudes toward time The past. In nonliterate cultures ideas and attitudes concerning the past tend to reflect present concerns. To some extent this happens in all societies, especially in those situations where we rely upon memory. But where the transmission of culture is entirely dependent upon oral communication, upon an interlocking series of conversations, the past is inevitably swallowed up in the present (Goody & Watt 1963). In the strictest sense, history begins with writing. Before (and partly after) the widespread use of writing, the past is a backward projection of the present, going straight back to the mythical age that saw the emergence of humanity and its present way of life. While stories of migration and genealogies contain much in the way of historical fact, they often constitute collective representations of contemporary relationships and act as the "charters" of existing institutions. For example, the variations in the average depth of genealogies are to be related not to intrinsic differences in short-term and long-term memories of the people concerned but to differences in the social groups that these genealogies help to tie together. However, in many centralized societies, accounts of dynastic events are often passed down by various mnemonic devices that partly shield their contents from the transmuting effects of oral tradition. It is only when writing gives a material embodiment to speech that the distant past can represent more than a backward extension of the present. Although each age still rewrites its own history, the past begins to acquire an independent existence of its own. Today an individual's cultural equipment is no longer limited to what is handed
40
TIME: Social Organization
down orally from one generation to the next but includes, potentially at least, the entire contents of the libraries, the written records of the past ages and dead societies, and the thoughts of distant scholars. The cultural heritage is vastly extended and with it the whole conceptualization of space and time. Change and duration become a more concrete part of one's existence. With the extension of writing into the personal and the ephemeral, by means of letters, newspapers, and diaries, even one's own past can achieve a modicum of objectivity, providing memory with an individual check list. Recording the speech of people over time and over space widens human experience and increases the likelihood of further change by making skepticism and disagreement articulate and therefore cumulative; literate traditions of dissent open up vistas of alternative forms of human organization. With the articulated calendar, the passage of time takes on a measured regularity. Old men can no longer look back unchallenged upon a past of 200 summers; with the registration of births and deaths, the specification of exact age becomes an intrinsic part of life and death. The reckoning of annual birthdays, whether for customary celebration or for astrological calculation, is a literate device. The Akan of west Africa named their children according to the weekday of birth (for example, Kwame is Saturday's child), which was seen as determining a child's character and sometimes functioned as a self-fulfilling prophecy; however, the system specified only the name of the day, not the day of the month or the year. The recognition of age differences and age order is a feature of all societies, but people in Western societies are preoccupied with specific age. An adult's first question to a child, after hearing his name, is about his age, and age will be the first entry in a man's obituary and the main feature on his tombstone. Numerical age rather than physical condition determines adult status; the patterned ages of 7, 14, and 21, so important in medieval law, have been largely replaced by new numbers that define an individual's ability to marry, to fight, and even to work, for bureaucratic organizations increasingly enforce compulsory retirement by age rather than by capacity. But characteristically this restriction applies to the employee more than to the director, to civil servants more than to politicians. The present. Literacy influences attitudes not only to the past but to the present and future as well. The permanency of written records makes a radical difference in the accumulation and storage
of knowledge and opinions and thus creates the possibility of more rapid change. But literacy brings with it an often troublesome inability to forget the past, so that the present has to engage in a deliberate struggle with older modes of thought and action. Individuals, groups, and governments strive to repeal laws which in nonliterate societies would have quite simply been forgotten or else would have undergone imperceptible changes to bring them into line with the new conditions. Unlike statutes, the Bible, the Koran, and other books of God cannot be amended, but their contents are reinterpreted over time and what was once intended literally is later seen as allegory and symbol, as metaphor and myth. But above all, attitudes toward time present focus upon the alternative uses of time that are offered by an elaborate division of labor, the minute scheduling that this division of labor entails, and the continual presence of a watch upon the wrist, which makes man ever conscious of the fleeting moment. In most literary traditions, writers express their regret at the passing of pleasure and the shortness of human life, but it is the perpetual concern with the passage of time that is characteristic of industrial man. Made aware that time is his scarcest resource, he learns to "spend" and "save" it like money. The ideology that stands at the center of industrial society stresses the full and productive use of time, a commodity that requires the most careful husbanding. This concern is as characteristic of socialist systems as of capitalist systems; during the industrialization of the Soviet Union an association was formed to encourage the carrying of watches and to expound the benefits of punctuality. Managers often find that the behavior of newly industrialized workers in developing countries deviates sharply from these enunciated values. The peasant is not used to "watching the clock" or to the demanding (and desiccating) routine of much of factory life. "Slaves?" I was once asked by an African visitor when he first saw rows of women working on an assembly line, their exits and entrances timed by "the clock," their every move organized by time and motion studies. For the peasant, time has been nature's time, and the organization of his activities largely his own affair. The future. The factors that bear upon attitudes toward the present are also relevant to attitudes toward the future; indeed, the difference simply turns on the question of scheduling over the longer term, as compared to the shorter term. In peasant communities the scheduling of production operates on an annual basis, but it is largely
TIME: Social Organization repetitive and future activity is mainly a continuation of the present. With the development of centralized political systems planning became more elaborate and included the storage of grain against famine, the construction of capital works, the build-up of supplies for military campaigns, and the organization of long-distance trade. But while the future may be visualized in terms of the success or failure of such undertakings, which are recognized as responsive to human foresight and control, deliberate social change is at first organizational rather than structural; even changes in the political order are a matter of rebellion rather than revolution, of replacing the officeholder rather than changing the over-all distribution of power. The possibility of long-range planning is vastly increased by the existence of writing. Literacy not only makes it technically possible to follow a complex plan but also to project and publicize a variety of alternative worlds (and the programs for their attainment) that vary along a continuum ranging from the pragmatic to the Utopian. And by the process of "ideological feedback," these programs often influence, and sometimes dominate, the direction of change. Plans, the projected organization of future time, are as much a requisite of the personal sphere as of the national and industrial domains. The maintenance of a yearly balance between production and consumption is not in itself enough: in most professional and managerial groups there is the necessity of planning for a surplus throughout a man's total career, a surplus that is required for heavy expenses such as house purchases and educational fees; and since the dominant attitudes favor providing for individual security rather than familial dependence, there is the problem of making provision for old age. A man's total perspective of time future extends beyond the end of this life to an afterlife. Beliefs in the continuity of some element of the human personality after death characterize all cultures, with the possible exception of communist societies and minority groups in secularized Western states. In most societies the distant past and future tend to be of peripheral interest. However, the idea of an earlier golden age, a Garden of Eden, is not an uncommon way of dealing with the universal "problem of evil," of explaining the actual imperfections and potential perfectibility of man. And when a culture of the less complex kind is hard pressed, typically by contact with European society, there is a tendency to seek comfort in ritual designed to bend time backward to an earlier paradise or to leapfrog time and hurry on the advent
41
of the Messiah, the coming of the millennium [Worsley 1957; Thrupp 1962; see also MILLENARISM]. By and large, the "other world" of agricultural societies is visualized as a continuation of this world, although there is usually some distribution of rewards and punishments for behavior on earth, so that those who have escaped from mundane punishments get their due in the afterlife. Societies with elaborate status hierarchies may redress the balance of this world by a reversal of status in the next; it is the rich rather than the poor who are told that it is difficult to enter the Christian heaven. The afterlife may be seen either as the final destination of humanity or as a stage in the continuous flow of life which leads back again into this world by some process of reincarnation or transmigration. Here again, the element of status reversal may be present; the relative lack of social mobility in Hindu society is partially offset by the fact that the worthy fulfillment of a man's present role may qualify him for a higher status in his next incarnation. The increasing pace of social change and individual mobility in industrial societies, combined with an increasing skepticism and secularization, makes such eschatologies of decreasing importance to society. Millennial dreams are replaced by political Utopias, the idea of a fixed destiny by a concern with educational mobility, and the belief in immortality by a concept of social progress and continuity. Nevertheless, few men, as they advance in age, do not feel the urge to extend the limits of their tenure, by church attendance, public activities, the written word, or identification with their progeny. It is difficult, if not impossible, for men to envisage a final end to time, on either a cosmic or an individual level, and the continuous chain of familial living helps to mitigate the prospect of complete finality. JACK GOODY [See also PERIODIZATION.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
ARGYLE, MICHAEL 1958 Religious Behaviour. London: Routledge. BAILLIE, G. H. 1929 Watches: Their History, Decoration and Mechanism. London: Methuen. BICKERMAN, ELIAS (1933) 1963 Chronologic. 2d ed. Leipzig: Teubner. BOHANNAN, PAUL J. 1953 Concepts of Time Among the Tiv of Nigeria. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 9:251-262. BOLTON, LYNDON 1924 Time Measurement. Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand. CIPOLLA, CARLO M. 1967 Clocks and Culture: 13001700. London: Collins.
42
TIME BUDGETS
CUMONT, FRANZ 1912 Astrology and Religion Among the Greeks and Romans. New York: Putnam. -> A paperback edition was published in 1960 by Dover. DE GRAZIA, SEBASTIAN 1962 Of Time, Work and Leisure. New York: Twentieth Century Fund. DURKHEIM, EMILE (1912) 1954 The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. London: Allen & Unwin; New York: Macmillan. -»• First published as Les formes elementaires de la vie religieuse, le systems totemique en Australie. A paperback edition was published in 1961 by Collier. EVANS-PRITCHARD, E. E. (1940) 1963 The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People. Oxford: Clarendon. FORTES, MEYER 1936 Ritual Festivals and Social Cohesion in the Hinterland of the Gold Coast. American Anthropologist New Series 38:590-604. FORTES, MEYER (1949)1963 Time and Social Structure: An Ashanti Case Study. Pages 54-84 in Meyer Fortes (editor), Social Structure: Studies Presented to A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. New York: Russell. FORTES, MEYER 1958 Introduction. Pages 1-14 in Jack Goody (editor), The Developmental Cycle in Domestic Groups. Cambridge Papers in Social Anthropology, No. 1. Cambridge Univ. Press. GENNEP, ARNOLD VAN (1909) 1960 The Rites of Passage. London: Routledge; Univ. of Chicago Press. -> First published in French. GLUCKMAN, MAX 1954 Rituals of Rebellion in South-east Africa. Manchester Univ. Press. GLUCKMAN, MAX 1963 Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa. New York: Free Press. GOODY, JACK 1962 Death, Property and the Ancestors: A Study of the Mortuary Customs of the LoDagaa of West Africa. Stanford Univ. Press. GOODY, JACK; and WATT, IAN 1963 The Consequences of Literacy. Comparative Studies in Society and History 5:304-345. GRANET, MARCEL (1934) 1950 La pensee chinoise. Paris: Michel. HALBWACHS, MAURICE 1925 Les cadres sociaux de la memoire. Paris: Alcan. HALLOWELL, A. IRVING 1937 Temporal Orientation in Western Civilization and in a Preliterate Society. American Anthropologist New Series 39:647-670. HERTZ, R. 1907 Contribution a une etude sur la representation collective de la mort. Annee sociologique 10:48-137. MAUSS, MARCEL (1906) 1960 Essai sur les variations saisonnieres des societes eskimos: Etude de morphologie sociale. Pages 389-477 in Marcel Mauss, Sociologie et anthropologie. 2d ed. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. -» Written in collaboration with H. Beuchat; first published in Volume 9 of Annee sociologique. MEYERHOFF, HANS 1955 Time in Literature. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press. MILHAM, WILLIS L. (1923) 1945 Time and Timekeepers. New York: Macmillan. MOORE, WILBERT E. 1963 Man, Time and Society. New York: Wiley. MORGAN GUARANTY TRUST COMPANY OF NEW YORK 1965 Bank and Public Holidays Throughout the World. New York: The Company. MUMFORD, LEWIS (1934) 1964 Technics and Civilization. New York: Harcourt.
NEEDHAM, JOSEPH 1965 Time and Eastern Man. Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Occasional Paper No. 21. London: The Institute. NEEDHAM, JOSEPH; LING, WANG; and PRICE, DEREK J. DE SOLLA 1960 Heavenly Clockwork: The Great Astronomical Clocks of Medieval China. Cambridge Univ. Press. NILSSON, MARTIN P. 1920 Primitive Time-reckoning. Oxford Univ. Press. PIAGET, JEAN 1946 Le developpement de la notion de temps chez I'enfant. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. THOMAS, NORTHCOTE W. 1924 The Week in West Africa. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 54:183-209. THRUPP, SYLVIA L. (editor) 1962 Millennial Dreams in Action: Essays in Comparative Study. Comparative Studies in Society and History, Supplement No. 2. The Hague: Mouton. TOULMIN, STEPHEN; and GOODFIELD, JUNE 1965 The Discovery of Time. New York: Harper. TRIMINGHAM, JOHN S. 1959 Islam in West Africa. Oxford: Clarendon. USHER, A. P. (1929) 1954 A History of Mechanical Inventions. Rev. ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. -» A paperback edition was published in 1959 by Beacon. WHITE, LYNN 1962 Medieval Technology and Social Change. Oxford: Clarendon. WORSLEY, PETER 1957 The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of "Cargo" Cults in Melanesia. London: MacGibbon & Kee.
TIME BUDGETS A time budget is a log or diary of the sequence and duration of activities engaged in by an individual over a specified period, most typically the 24hour day. Time-budget research involves the collection of numerous such protocols from members of a population to analyze main trends and subgroup differences in the allocation of time. While many social inquiries are concerned with the amount of time spent on a particular kind of activity (the journey to work or time given to television watching), the term "time budget" is generally reserved for an exhaustive accounting of a slice of time in individual experience, whatever the component activities happen to be. Such time budgets naturally yield information on the time consumed by any of the wide range of activities in which man engages. Yet at the same stroke, this information is given a context, since the protocols pose the question of, for example, what else it is that people who spend little time on television do with the time thereby saved or of where the time comes from for those who devote enormous quantities to it. One of the special assets of time-budget research is the immutable fact that no human
TIME BUDGETS being, however rich, poor, wise, or foolish, can dispose of more time than any other within the same period. Hence, variations in time allocations from person to person must depend on "trading off" time from some activities toward others. Indeed, the phrase "time budget" has arisen because time, like money, is a resource that is continually being allocated by the individual, although with varying degrees of consciousness and shortterm discretion. Like money, time is thought of as being spent, saved, invested, or wasted. It is presumed that analysis of the structure of time allocation gives behavioral evidence of a peculiarly "hard" kind concerning individual preferences and values, especially in the more optional forms of time use. The time budget as a research tool has been employed in such areas as the study of life styles, the sociology of leisure, and research on aging and other aspects of the life cycle. Collection of systematic time-budget data is a relatively recent activity. Such data also provide material for curiosity concerning long-term secular trends in the "quality of life," such as the division of time between work and play (de Grazia 1962) and the role of systemlevel work inputs in economic development. The history of time-budget research The systematic collection of family financial budgets represents one of the earliest forms of empirical research at a microsociological level, with examples dating back to seventeenth-century Europe and coming to flower in the celebrated work of Frederic Le Play in the nineteenth century. The extension of the paradigm to time expenditure arrived somewhat more slowly, however. Friedrich Engels' The Situation of the Working Class in England, first published in 1845, contains a wide variety of information on the daily round of industrial workers, with some quantitative estimates of time expenditures. Perhaps the first careful and exhaustive time budgets covering at least the period of work were represented in the time-andmotion studies of Frederick Taylor in his attempt, around the turn of the century, to institute "scientific management." The first large-scale study of exhaustive 24-hour time budgets was carried out in 1924 on Moscow workers by Stanislav G. Strumilin, as part of the postrevolutionary drive toward more rational economic planning [see LEISURE]. In the West, most comparable work during the same period was focused on leisure, ignoring the portions of the day that were defined in some sense as nonleisure.
43
However, near the end of the 1920s the Bureau of Home Economics of the U.S. Department of Agriculture conducted five studies of time use among farm women that involved full time budgets in the now customary sense of the phrase. By the 1930s more studies were beginning to appear. Lundberg and his associates (1934) based their intensive examination of suburban life in Westchester County in part on nearly 5,000 time budgets drawn from about 2,500 respondents. Sorokin and Berger's Time-budgets of Human Behavior (1939) attempted to use such materials to investigate the structure of human motives and in so doing provided one of the more germinal surveys of the possibilities of the time budget as a research tool. Along with the rapid expansion of survey research after World War n, the generation of timebudget data has shown an enormous increase, although this trend is less prominent in the United States than in most other industrialized nations. Part of the impetus for this research has come from commercial and governmental enterprises concerned with the timing of activities in their mass populations. Perhaps the largest single timebudget survey, involving a sample of 170,000 persons, was carried out in Japan in 1960-1961 to aid in the scheduling of radio and television programming (Nakanishi 1963). One of the few nationwide time-budget surveys in the United States was conducted in 1954 for similar reasons by the Mutual Broadcasting Company, and comparable, although smaller, surveys for the mass media have been done in most countries of western Europe. Another impetus to such work has come from the economic-planning needs of governments. After a period in which social research of all kinds was neglected, the tradition of time-budget surveys established by Strumilin in the Soviet Union was resumed on a massive scale in the late 1950s. In addition to thorough methodological work, the monitoring of time budgets has become sufficiently institutionalized in the Soviet Union for national scientific conferences to have been held for the purpose of establishing uniform codes and standards, and several hundred thousand man-days' worth of time-budget material has been accumulated (Szalai 1966). In a similar vein, time-budget data were gathered in Hungary in 1963 by the Central Statistical Office, as part of the official microcensus. Quite generally speaking, timebudget work represents one of the most vigorous traditions of social research in eastern Europe. Western social scientists have used the technique
44
TIME BUDGETS
much more sparingly, although often with an eye toward broadening its utility. The most ambitious effort at a rigorously comparative cross-national time-budget study was launched in 1964 under the sponsorship of UNESCO and the International Social Science Council. Directed by Alexander Szalai, research institutes in Bulgaria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France, East and West Germany, Hungary, Peru, Poland, the Soviet Union, the United States, and Yugoslavia had by 1966 successfully collected timebudget information on probability samples of urban populations in their respective countries, following standardized methods of interviewing and coding. Extensions of the study design to Greece, Cuba, and Canada were also projected (United Nations . . . 1966). Time-budget methodology The first decision to be faced by the student of time use has to do with choice of time scale for his budget collection. Some time budgets are organized to cover time spent at the workplace; others span only "leisure hours." At the opposite extreme, it is possible to imagine time budgets covering an individual's life cycle, yielding information of totally different significance, although nothing but the most sketchy efforts of this kind exist at present [see LIFE CYCLE]. There are grounds for arguing that estimates of productive work time should be based on time budgets covering annual cycles, thereby including vacations and a reasonable sampling of illnesses. In point of fact, however, the vast majority of time-budget research is geared to the 24 hours of a single day in the life of a respondent. By the gathering of enough time diaries, dispersed over weekdays and weekends as well as across the seasons of a year, from various individuals of differing ages, a synthetic picture of weekly, annual, and life-cycle variations can be organized from single-day protocols. In those rare instances where individuals have kept diaries for much longer than a single day or two, results have been reassuring. For example, Lundberg and his associates (1934, appendix) reported, among other things, that time diaries showed high stability in activity allocations for respondents maintaining them for longer periods. At first glance, the collection of 24-hour time budgets would seem to be a relatively simple and straightforward task. Indeed, the time continuum itself offers a quantitative variable of a purity and precision rarely found in social research, and one readily understood by almost any respondent in
industrialized societies. Yet closer familiarity makes clear that the gathering of even day-length time-budget information poses an oppressive array of complexities. The method shares all of the common problems of reliable population sampling and data elicitation and adds many unique burdens as well. Though time may be a "clean" and "hard" variable, activity units are not. How finely should we slice in establishing an array of activities? Chronicles of "a day's activities" might be so grossly characterized as to show but six or seven activities; or again, they might reflect such a fine grain of movement and action as to number two hundred or more for the same day. Some activities, such as sleeping, are rather clearly demarcated. Others are punctuated by major spatial displacements ("drove to the drugstore"). For many activities, however, lines of demarcation blur, and the common guideposts become deceptive. Is "work at the office" simply to be left as an undifferentiated block of time, or is it to be thinly subdivided? "Shopping" often involves a sequence of spatial displacements. Is it one activity by itself or one for each shop visited, each purchase made, or what? And more pressing still, how is the researcher to handle simultaneous activities, such as cooking dinner while listening to the radio and keeping an eye on the children? Increasingly, investigators have tried to depend on the respondent himself to define what an activity is by the way he chooses to record the events of his day. Thus, one method of data collection— asking the subject to check activities from a predesignated list of possibilities—tends to be avoided as imposing too much outside structure on spontaneous perceptions. Nevertheless, when "raw," or volunteered, descriptions are accepted, some of the burden returns to the investigator in the form of decisions as to how the concrete acts are to be coded into more general classes. And whether the respondent is asked to "precede" or the coding is accomplished later, there is an intrusion on reality which can affect results in vital ways. There are undoubtedly real differences in activity levels between persons, from the bedridden invalid to the harassed professional, so that the sheer number of activities per day should in fact vary. But some of the recorded interpersonal variation can be due to different perceptions of the task instructions, and the whole texture of findings can be displaced by nearly arbitrary decisions on the part of the investigator in providing task instructions or in fixing the frequency with which activities should be recorded (for instance, should it be
TIME BUDGETS every five minutes, every hour, or four times a day?). In general, the more activities are recorded or coded in gross fashion, the more alike people of different social statuses appear to be. In order to keep the time chronicle totaling a tidy 24 hours, researchers have often decided to discard the "less important" of any activities carried on simultaneously, although any such decisions lead immediately to new problems concerning the definition of importance. More recently, however, secondary and tertiary activities are being maintained as separate parts of the record, and intriguing work on the incidence and structure of such simultaneous activities is under way (Guilbert et al. 1965). Similarly, while some analytic grouping (that is, coding) of activities is always required, the trend is toward increasingly detailed activity codes that hew more closely to concrete reality, at least in the first stage of analysis. Subsequently, such codes permit greater flexibility in regrouping elements for differing analytic purposes. The standardized code for time-budget research in the Soviet Union involves 99 categories; the UNESCO multination project proceeds at the same level of detail. Broadly speaking, there are three main methods of eliciting 24-hour time budgets from respondents. In the diary method, the respondent simply writes down his own log of activities and their durations, more or less synchronously, on the basis of instructions and forms provided. Drawbacks of such a straightforward approach include the fact that subjects show considerable variation in the diligence and care with which such diaries are maintained, and the protocols are thus very uneven in quality. Moreover, functionally illiterate persons can be frightened by such a task, and a distressingly large proportion of them refuse to cooperate. A second method, the "yesterday interview," requires the subject to reconstruct his previous day's sequence of activities orally, under probing from an interviewer, and to estimate times spent on each until the full period of 24 hours has been accounted for. The limitations of this approach are obvious: people forget. Experimental evidence as to differences between perceived time and physical time abound, and many details are completely lost to memory at only a day's remove. A third method involves observation and recording of the individual's activities by a second party. However, such an approach tends to have low feasibility for both cost and privacy reasons, and it has become apparent that the outside observer has much more difficulty deducing meaningful "activity units" than does the actor himself.
45
While most research in the past has depended on the unsupported diary method, the current trend is toward overcoming the liabilities of each method by a combined approach. Thus, for example, a subject may be asked to maintain a diary for 24 hours in the standard manner, but the log itself may be used as merely a refresher or initial skeleton for more detailed discussion in a "yesterday interview." Even a sketchy diary will put stringent limits on the respondent's imagination as far as time durations are concerned, yet the interviewing can serve to bring the account of activities on the part of a poorly educated subject to a level of detail that a well-educated subject may be able to capture by himself. Whenever a diary or an outside observer is involved, a burden is placed on the respondent which considerably exceeds that of a standard samplesurvey interview. Therefore, refusal rates mount from the normal insignificant levels to heights that daunt the most experienced researcher. An embarrassing proportion of the time-budget literature from the past has been generated from captive audiences like schoolchildren, or suffers refusal rates so high as to call the data into question at the outset, or has paid no attention whatever to representative sampling. One of the time-budget studies which is most challenging at a conceptual level (Sorokin & Berger 1939) is based on about 5 per cent returns of diary forms distributed to workers on relief and white-collar unemployed in the Boston area during the depression of the 1930s. More generally, it is obvious that potential respondents who refuse to participate because they are "too busy" strike to the very heart of the purposes of the study. Although it has been shown possible in recent years to approach a probability sample of a cross-section population with the 24-hour timebudget task and keep refusals within tolerable limits (20 per cent, for example), such success depends on elaborately planned approaches and inducements. The variety of complexities in time-budget methodology acts in turn to reduce the cumulative value of such data collections. In principle, some of the most exciting questions that such research can help to answer have to do with long-term, secular trends in time use. Yet while studies have been done in many national contexts for several decades, the comparability across most of these investigations is limited or, worse still, unknown. Activity codes are incompatible from study to study; precise interviewing and coding instructions that affect the data are lost; samples are haphazard and unrepresentative. The best that can be
46
TIME BUDGETS
said is that there has been rapid methodological improvement, although good time-budget work remains complicated and expensive. Uses and limitations of time-budget data Assuming that they are reliably executed, time budgets by themselves provide extensive but not intensive information: the data are broad but shallow. Their breadth is reflected in the astonishing variety of researchers who can find in them titillating bits of information relevant to their specialties, or useful, if simple, parameter estimates. At the same time, most specialists are dismayed that the relevant information goes no further than it does. Hence, much of recent timebudget work has been moving toward a more multidimensional treatment of the activity itself; it may even involve use of the time budget as a backdrop, or frame of reference, for more intensive inquiry into some theoretically interesting subset of the day's activities. Before going further, however, it should be noted that the simple time budget can itself be manipulated in a striking number of ways, each of which has value in one or another specific context. Many studies begin and end with examination of the summary duration of time allotted to the various activities in the code, expressed as an average across respondents. However, it is often useful to modify this information with indications of the prevalence of an activity. Thus, for example, the average duration of working time outside the home is greater in the Soviet Union than in the United States. However, most of the increment is due to a much higher proportion of working women, rather than to long work hours for individuals. Thus both the collective fact and the individual fact are of social significance. For other inquiries, the timing of activities across the 24 hours of the day is of prime importance. This is true of programmers for the mass media, who need to know when in the day various portions of the populations will be at home and ready to turn on their television or radio sets. Similarly, regional planners and traffic experts collect and use data on the time of day that commuting and other travel take place as well as data on the duration of the journey to work. Studies of shift work by time budgets show the great differences in offwork activity that occur when a person's work schedule is out of phase with the modal rhythm in the society. Or again, time budgets can be analyzed from the point of view of patterns in the sequence of activities, quite apart from their duration or timing. Finally, people with similar patterns of
activity duration may also differ markedly in the frequency with which the same activities are repeated in a day's time: some organize their days into relatively large blocks, while others pick up activities and drop them often, either by design or through interruptions from the environment. Despite the numerous ways in which unadorned time-budget data can be viewed, there is an increasing tendency toward expansion of the information about the activities themselves. It is becoming commonplace, for example, to collect information on where and with whom each activity took place. The locus of activities and their sequence are again of interest in regional planning and have led to conceptualization of the "household activity system" as a part of urban ecology (Chapin & Hightower 1966). Time-budget data designating the "partners" for various activities can be used to test hypotheses concerning variations in interpersonal contacts (Reiss 1959). Nelson Foote and Rolf Meyersohn have experimented with the collection of further information concerning the affect felt toward each activity reported, the desire for more or less time for it, whether it is seen as work or play, routine or unusual, and whether the activity was initiated by the subject or by others acting toward him. Similarly, they have collected time budgets reflecting more of the nexus of social behavior, by pairing diaries for husbands and wives covering the same day (Foote 1961, p. 171). Somewhat similar analyses attempt to draw in all of the significant social microcosm of the individual—family, neighborhood, and co-workers (Chombart de Lauwe 1956). While such expansions are helping to enrich time-budget studies, the fact remains that a wide gulf still exists between the manifest activity as it is recorded and the latent functions of the activity for the individual which give it ultimate meaning or significance. The act of repairing an appliance in one's home may reflect a desire to convert free time into money saved to piece out one's income, or an inability to secure sufficiently rapid service from outside, or a hobby of tinkering, or some combination of the three. More theoretically satisfying ways of grouping detailed activities into broader classes are often avoided because of just such difficulties. Where ingenious activity groupings are made, there lurks the inevitable suspicion that were the truth known, the same activities might fall in quite different classes for various subjects and that the substantive results may be artifacts of such "forcings" of the data. It is for reasons of this sort that time budgets seem to have been found less useful for investiga-
TIME SERIES: General tions of life style than might be expected on the surface. Activity designations tend to be more incisive about the forms of activities than about their contents. The fact of watching television or having a conversation with a neighbor is recorded, but the types of programs watched or the subjects of informal discourse are rarely catalogued. And variations in what is called "life style" seem thoroughly muted in the process, although some differences do linger on in the forms themselves. Thus, at one level time-budget data convey an unusual range of implications for practical policy planning and also hold at least some interest for social theory. At the same time they are costly to collect in reliable ways, and without considerable expansion of the texture of information gathered, they often seem disappointingly primitive. PHILIP E. CONVERSE [See also INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS, articles on INDUSTRIAL AND BUSINESS PSYCHOLOGY and THE SOCIOLOGY OF WORK; LEISURE; PLANNING, SOCIAL, article on
47
lihood Time of the Japanese. Tokyo: NHK Radio & TV Culture Research Institute. REISS, ALBERT J. JR. 1959 Rural-Urban and Status Differences in Interpersonal Contacts. American Journal of Sociology 65:182-195. SOROKIN, PITIRIM A.; and BERGER, CLARENCE Q. 1939 Time-budgets of Human Behavior. Harvard Sociological Studies, Vol. 2. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. SZALAI, ALEXANDER 1966 Trends in Comparative Timebudget Research. American Behavioral Scientist 9, no. 9:3-8. UNITED NATIONS EDUCATIONAL, SCIENTIFIC AND CULTURAL ORGANIZATION 1966 The Multinational Comparative Time Budget Research Project. Report for the Sixth World Congress of Sociology, Evian, France. Vienna: European Coordination Center for Research and Documentation in Social Sciences.
TIME SERIES i. GENERAL n. ADVANCED PROBLEMS in. CYCLES iv. SEASONAL ADJUSTMENT
Gerhard Tintner P. Whittle Herman Wold Julius Shiskin
REGIONAL AND URBAN PLANNING; TlME, article OU
SOCIAL ORGANIZATION; and the biography of LUNDBERG.] BIBLIOGRAPHY 1961 Work and Leisure. New York:
ANDERSON, NELS Free Press. CHAPIN, F. STUART JR.; and HIGHTOWER, HENRY C. 1966 Household Activity Systems: A Pilot Investigation. Urban Studies Research Monograph. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina, Institute for Research in Social Science, Center for Urban and Regional Studies. CHOMBART DE LAUWE, PAUL H. 1956 La vie quotidienne des families ouvrieres: Recherches sur les comportements sociaux de consommation. Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. DE GRAZIA, SEBASTIAN 1962 Of Time, Work and Leisure. New York: Twentieth Century Fund. FOOTE, NELSON N. 1961 Methods for Study of Meaning in Use of Time. Pages 155-176 in Robert W. Kleemeier (editor), Aging and Leisure: A Research Perspective Into the Meaningful Use of Time. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. GUILBERT, MADELINE; LOWIT, NICOLE; and CREUSEN, JOSEPH 1965 Problemes de methode pour une enquete de budgets-temps: Les cumuls d'occupations. Revue francaise de sociologie 6:325-335. KLEEMEIER, ROBERT W. (editor) 1961 Aging and Leisure: A Research Perspective Into the Meaningful Use of Time. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. LARRABEE, ERIC; and MEYERSOHN, ROLF (editors) (1958) 1960 Mass Leisure. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. LUNDBERG, GEORGE A. et al. 1934 Leisure: A Suburban Study. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. MEIER, RICHARD L. 1959 Human Time-allocation: A Basis for Social Accounts. Journal of the American Institute of Planners 25:27-33. NAKANISHI, NAOMICHI 1963 A Report on the How-DoPeople-Spend-Their-Time Survey: An Analysis of Live-
GENERAL
A time series is a set of data ordered in time, typically with observations made at regular intervals, for example, each census year, annually, quarterly, or monthly. This article focuses on the analysis of time series of economic data. The analytical methods used are also applied in other fields, for example, in psychological encephalography, in the analysis of sociological series from panel studies, and in the analysis of voting series in political science. Although data from sampling surveys have been used increasingly in recent years, most of the observations utilized in econometric studies still come from economic time series. This is especially true of econometric studies dealing with problems that are important from the point of view of economic policy, such as the nature of business cycles and the determinants of economic development. An area of growing theoretical and empirical interest is the pooling of time series and cross-section data [see CROSS-SECTION ANALYSIS]. Time series have provided an indispensable source of information for econometric analyses, but peculiar features of such data warrant special caution in their use. The difficulties that beset the use of time series in econometric studies have four different causes. The first is the simultaneity of economic relations. Observed values of economic variables are usually generated by a system of economic relations. It is now well known that it may be impos-
48
TIME SERIES: General
sible to estimate some of these relations; that is, some relations may be underidentified. Classical least squares estimation of a single relation, ignoring the others, is in general inconsistent. Since the pioneering efforts of Trygve Haavelmo, a substantial portion of the work of econometricians has been devoted to the development of consistent estimation methods for simultaneous economic relations [see SIMULTANEOUS EQUATION ESTIMATION]. The second cause of difficulty is errors in variables or errors in observations. Reported values of some economic variables are often subject to error resulting from techniques of collection or are only approximations to unobservable variables specified in the theoretical relation to be estimated. Methods have been advanced to deal with errors in variables in particular situations (see Johnston 1963, pp. 148-176), but there remains much to be done in this important area. Multicollinearity is the third cause of difficulty. Many economic time series are highly correlated with one another (are multicollinear), owing to common factors that influence all economic activity. Prior to estimating a particular economic relation, we are often led to specify a regression model containing a number of explanatory variables, and we are interested in isolating the independent influence of each of these variables on the variable to be explained. If the explanatory variables are multicollinear, it will be impossible, using the usual least squares regression procedure, to determine with any confidence the influence of each of them. Thus, multicollinearity of economic time series often impedes empirical testing of alternative hypotheses. The fourth cause of difficulty is autocorrelation. It is evident from our general knowledge of the economic system that the consecutive items of an economic time series will seldom be independent. The simplest case of this lack of independence is termed autocorrelation; it creates great problems in econometric studies, since the modern theory of statistical estimation and inference, as developed by R. A. Fisher, J. Neyman, A. Wald, and their disciples, is frequently designed for analysis of data that constitute random samples, i.e., where the assumption that items in the sample are statistically independent is justified or where the dependence has a simple character. Economic data, like the data of astronomy and meteorology, do not come from carefully designed experiments but are the result of complex and evolving empirical relationships. Autocorrelation typically increases with the decrease of the time interval of observations. Hence, if we could obtain daily instead of yearly observations (which is frequently impossible with
economic data), we would perhaps not increase the available number of degrees of freedom very substantially. Much effort has been expended in the development of methods for dealing with autocorrelation (more generally, lack of independence), but because of the great mathematical difficulties involved and the lack of simple, realistic theoretical models, the results have been less than spectacular. In practice, all four problems occur simultaneously. However, since it is so difficult to deal with all of them at once, much work focuses on only one problem and assumes that the others do not exist. Since this approach may be unrealistic when working with actual data, interpretations of empirical analyses are often most difficult, thus diminishing the value of such analyses for practical applications to economic policy. The traditional analysis of time series has dealt primarily with isolating the trend, the irregularcycle, the fairly regular periodic seasonal, and the random components of the series (Kuznets 1934). It is assumed that each component is independent of the others and can be analyzed separately, that each component is generated by a particular underlying process or model, and that the series is simply the sum of the components. This procedure is now considered somewhat obsolete, although it still provides a useful point of departure. It would be preferable to avoid these perhaps unrealistic assumptions, instead employing a procedure based upon the premise that a series is generated by a single model capable of producing trends and fluctuations and incorporating random elements. The mathematical model of a time series is a stochastic process (Bartlett 1955). A family of jointly distributed random variables linearly arranged according to a numerical index (often corresponding to time) is called a stochastic process. As it stands, this characterization is so inclusive as to be of little value; useful results can be obtained only by starting with restrictive assumptions on the random variables of the family. The theory of stochastic processes has been studied by many excellent mathematicians, and great progress has been made in recent years. Unfortunately, the study of statistical methods for observable stochastic processes is not nearly so well developed as studies of a more purely probabilistic nature. In part this stems from mathematical difficulties, but another factor is also important. Many of the outstanding and important applications of stochastic processes arise in physics, chemistry, and communications theory, where the samples involved are so large that purely statistical problems, involving statistical inference from the sample to the population, are perhaps not very important.
TIME SERIES: General Even where statistical results exist, as in the statistical treatment of stationary time series (Grenander & Rosenblatt 1957), i.e., time series that lack a trend and whose variances and higher moments are independent of time, the results are usually valid only for large samples. (Of course, the same is true for other branches of statistics as well.) Although development of a small-sample theory of stochastic processes faces formidable mathematical difficulties, it is just such a theory that is needed for the analysis of the relatively short economic time series commonly available. The mathematical problems can be made more tractable if we make highly unrealistic assumptions, for example, the so-called circular assumption—that samples are taken from the repetitive population Xj, X 2 , • • • , X^, X ± , X 2 , • • • . But lacking a small-sample theory, we are often forced to use large-sample methods as crude approximations to valid methods. It should also be remarked that many results in this field are still confined to tests of hypotheses; very few deal with the perhaps more important problems of estimation. Trend The trend is one of the most intractable features of economic time series. By "trend" we mean the long-term secular movement of a series, that is, the mathematical expectation of Xt, EXt, a function of time. It is, of course, difficult to distinguish the trend from cycles of long duration. Parametric tests for trend. One general procedure for estimating and testing for trend in a time series involves assuming a specific form for the trend function, estimating the function, and testing the significance of the estimated relation. Among the most commonly used functional forms are the polynomial and the logistic. Orthogonal polynomials. Suppose we have a set of observations, X ± , X 2 , • • • , Xt, • • •, XN, on the variable X for the equidistant points in time 1,2, • • • , N. We might assume that this series was generated by the polynomial function ut,
t=l,2, • • • , N,
where the a's are parameters to be estimated and Ut is a random error term that is normally distributed with constant variance. Also, the u's are independent. Rather than fit this ordinary polynomial, it is simpler to estimate the orthogonal polynomial i=l
t + ut,
where £it is an zth-degree polynomial in t such that ZXf < t = 0 for all i and Z?=1 £ « £ , « = 0 for all i
49
and j, i ^ j. Making use of orthogonal polynomials, we can easily estimate a polynomial of degree p, having once estimated a polynomial of degree p — 1. Application of the method of least squares yields
bt =
£
One method for determining the degree of the polynomial that best fits the data has been developed by R. A. Fisher (1925). Let Sp denote the sum of the squared residuals from an estimated polynomial of degree p. We fit polynomials of degree 1,2, • • • , until Sp+l — Sp is not statistically significant. This may be determined by an F-test, assuming the w's are normally distributed and independent. A recent method put forward by T. W. Anderson (1962) may turn out to have major advantages over Fisher's. However, application of Anderson's method requires that we decide a priori the highest degree of the polynomial that might possibly be used. The tests proposed by Anderson then enable us to decide whether we might adequately fit a polynomial of lower order. Although polynomial trends fitted by the method of orthogonal polynomials are often accurate representations of the past history of many time series, it is very dangerous to employ them for extrapolating these series, since polynomials tend to infinity with advancing time. The logistic function. The study of economic development focuses particular attention on long economic time series that can be used to characterize the nature of economic development. While the true form of long-term secular change is uncertain, the logistic function (Davis 1941, p. 247) recommends itself by its success, albeit limited, in animal and human population studies. Also, the logistic function, unlike the polynomial, has an upper asymptote—a desirable property. If we suppose once again that we have a time series Xt, t = 1, • • • , N, the stochastic form of the logistic function that we assume generated these observations can be written as
k 1 + be at
ut,
where k, a, and b are parameters to be estimated and ut is a random error term. Estimation of the parameters is difficult, since they enter the function in a nonlinear fashion. Hotelling (1927) proposed a method for fitting the logistic that sur-
50
TIME SERIES: General
mounts this difficulty. Working with the logistic in its nonstochastic form, he utilizes the time derivative of \ogKXt and forms the differential equation d(log e X,) dt
dXt dt
1
We can now obtain least squares or maximum likelihood estimators of a and a/k, and from these an estimator of k; b can then be estimated, using a method suggested by Rhodes (1940). Retelling's method has the disadvantage of requiring a discrete approximation to the derivative dXt/dt, since economic data are typically available only for discrete time intervals. Hence, it seems preferable to utilize an estimation procedure that relies on a difference equation rather than on a differential equation. Such a procedure has been developed by Tintner (1960, p. 273). Utilizing the transformation zt = l/Xt, a difference equation for zt can be derived from the logistic, namely, 1 -e-
+ e-azt
Application of least squares estimation methods, which are also maximum likelihood methods if the errors are normally distributed, will yield estimators of ( 1 — e~a}/k and e~a, from which estimators of a and k can be obtained; b may again be estimated by Rhodes's formula. Moving averages. In fitting polynomials or logistics to an economic time series in order to isolate trend, it is assumed that a simple function will accurately capture the trend throughout the series. An alternative method, which does not involve such a strong assumption, is the method of moving averages. Moving averages can most effectively be applied to time series containing seasonal or cyclical components of relatively constant period. Given a time series X t , t=l,---,N, the trend value of the series at t — m + 1 is found by taking an average of the first 2m + 1 elements of the series, where m is chosen so that 2m + 1 corresponds to the period of the seasonal or cyclical component. (The fact that the period of business cycles is irregular creates difficulties in the application of this method.) Similarly, the trend value at t — m + 2 is found by averaging the observations X,, • • • , X.2m+.,. In general, the trend value at t is an average of X,_ m , • • • , Xt+m. An immediately evident shortcoming of this procedure is that no trend values are obtained for the first and last m time periods covered by the original series unless special methods are adopted. The weights attached to the elements to be averaged in each set of 2m + 1 consecutive observa-
tions may be chosen in a variety of ways. Weighting each element by the constant l/(2m + 1 ) (taking a simple mean of the elements) is equivalent to fitting a linear relation to each set; more complex weighting schemes can be used, so that the procedure is equivalent to fitting a polynomial of any given degree to each set. The degree of the polynomial to be fitted may be found by the variate difference method proposed by Tintner (1940, p. 100). The method of moving averages is thus seen to be similar to the fitting of polynomial functions to time series, but rather than fitting one polynomial to the entire series, a polynomial is fitted to subsets of 2m + 1 consecutive observations. Caution must be exercised in the use of moving averages, since the application of such averages will introduce autocorrelation into even a pure random series and modify any existing autocorrelation. (Of course, the fitting of linear or polynomial trends may have similar effects.) Also, the use of moving averages will diminish the amplitude of existing periodic movements (Tintner 1952, pp. 203-207; see also Slutsky 1927). For example, if we use moving averages to eliminate the seasonal component, this will diminish the amplitude of other cyclical fluctuations in the series. Nonparametric tests for trend. The methods for estimating the trend component of a time series discussed thus far all rely on our having some a priori knowledge of the form of the trend function. As is frequently the case in economics, we may feel very uncertain about the form of the function and would like a statistical test for trend that does not depend on such knowledge, i.e., a nonparametric test. Such a test has been devised by Mann (1945) on the basis of earlier work by Kendall (1938). Given the series X,, t = 1, • • • , N, we assign ranks pl, • • • , pN to each of the observations. For example, if X, is the fourth largest item in the series, then pl ~ 4. We then compute a coefficient of disarray, T
2S N(N-l)'
where S, called the total score, is defined as S = 2 P - i N ( N - 1). Here P, the positive score, is the sum ICfr^rii, where n^ is the number of elements X i+1 , • • • , XA* with ranks larger than Pi. The coefficient T may take on values from — 1 to +1, large negative values indicating a downward trend in the series and large positive values an upward trend. If there is no trend, r should be in the neighborhood of zero. The significance of T may be determined by a sig-
TIME SERIES: General nificance test for S, for which tables have been provided by Kendall (1948) for small N. For larger values of N, S can be considered normally distributed, with mean zero and variance equal to N(N — 1)(2N + 5)/18. [Further discussions of nonparametric methods in trend analysis may be found in Foster & Stuart (1954) and Hemelrijk (1958). See also NONPARAMETRIC STATISTICS, article On RANKING METHODS.] Oscillatory and periodic movements The study of oscillatory and periodic movements in economic time series deals with seasonal fluctuations, the business cycle, and related matters. The procedures to be described have been developed to analyze series without trends or series from which trends have been eliminated. The primary concerns are discovering the statistical models that appear to have generated the oscillatory time series frequently observed and estimating the parameters of these models. (Useful methods for such analysis are to be found in Bruckmann & Pfanzagl 1960 and Hannan 1963.) Practically all economic time series display fluctuations of one sort or another. Before we embark on analysis of a particular series, it is desirable to determine whether the observed fluctuations represent anything beyond a purely random process. A nonparametric test for this purpose has been constructed by Walk's and Moore (1941). The test involves determining whether the number of completed runs of length 1, 2, and greater than 2 differs significantly from the expected number of such runs in a series of independent random observations. (A run is defined as the occurrence of consecutive first differences having the same sign.) The statistic comparing the actual with the expected number of such runs is used in an approximate x2 test, for which tables are provided by Wallis and Moore. They have also established a test employing the total number of completed runs as the test statistic, a statistic that is normally distributed in large samples. [See NONPARAMETRIC STATISTICS, article on RUNS.] Periodogram analysis. Periodogram analysis is based on the idea that a strictly periodic time series can be expressed as the sum of a number of harmonic waves, each represented by a sine or cosine term. Suppose the variable Y is a function of time, say, Y, = f ( t ) . If f(t + T) = f ( t ) for all values of t, then Yt can be expressed as a Fourier series, namely, tAJ
Y,
360jt , 360;A B, cos —~r— 1 > E'/ A, sin. —~r—ID
51
where T is referred to as the period of oscillation and Ao , AJ , and B, are constants. It can be shown that where R, is the amplitude (maximum value of Y) corresponding to the harmonic term with period of length T/j (Schuster 1906). In practical work we wish to determine the principal harmonic components of the time series X t , t = I , • • • , N. We assume that Xt is generated by a Fourier series plus a normally distributed nonautocorrelated random error term with zero mean and constant variance. We attempt to find the harmonic components corresponding to particular periods that are significant in explaining Xt . To accomplish this we compute the Fourier coefficients, ,
v
. 360nt f sln N
Bn =
COS
3QOnt N
corresponding to the harmonic component with period of length N/n. We can then compute the squared amplitude,
R 2n — ~
4 2 i DD2 n ^ n-
A
The graph of Rn against N/n for different values of n is called the periodogram of Xt. To determine whether the harmonic component with period N/n is significant, we test the significance of R2n. Three tests are available—Schuster's test, Walker's test, and Fisher's test. A complete discussion of these tests and tables for the test statistics are provided by Davis (1941). Although periodogram analysis has been used in the past, the results of empirical applications hardly justify much hope for its success in the future. The model on which it is based contains two unrealistic assumptions. First, it is assumed that apart from random disturbances, peaks and troughs occur with strict regularity in economic time series. Second, a random disturbance at a given date is assumed to have no effect on the future course of the time series. Spectral analysis. Many of the shortcomings of periodogram analysis can be overcome by employing a more general method known as spectral analysis. Spectral analysis has wider applicability, since it allows for random disturbances in the amplitudes, periods, and phase angles of the harmonic terms in the Fourier series representation of an economic time series. Both the periodogram and the spectrum of a time
52
TIME SERIES: General
series may be thought of as decompositions of the variance of the series at different frequencies (the frequency of a harmonic term is the reciprocal of the length of the period), but the periodogram is based on the assumption of strict periodicity. The periodogram of a series that is not strictly periodic is not a consistent estimator of the spectrum at given frequencies, although it is an unbiased estimator. Since most economic time series are not strictly periodic, statistical estimation of the spectrum is generally preferable to periodogram analysis. Rather than decompose the variance of the series into components at given frequencies ( as in periodogram analysis), we decompose the variance into components in the neighborhood of various frequencies, in order to obtain statistically consistent results. (Various methods have been proposed to estimate the theoretical spectral function, discussions of which may be found in Bartlett 1955; Blackman & Tukey 1958; Grenander & Rosenblatt 1957; Wilks 1962. For additional information on spectral analysis, see Hannan I960; 1963; Jenkins & Priestley 1957; Nerlove 1964; Parzen 1961; Symposium on Time Series Analysis 1963; Takacs I960; Whittle 1963.) Interdependence of observations The interdependence of successive observations, or autocorrelation, is the one outstanding feature that fundamentally distinguishes the methods appropriate for econometric analysis from statistical methods useful in fields where observations are independent. Tests for autocorrelation. Autocorrelation (sometimes called serial correlation) refers to correlation between Xs and Xt in a time series, where s ^ t. Correlation between Xt and Xt+l is often called firstorder autocorrelation. Autocorrelation may arise through different mechanisms and in different circumstances; hence, a variety of statistical tests for autocorrelation have been developed. The simpler procedures test for autocorrelation between Xt and X f _ ; - for a given value of ;". A very general test of this type is the nonparametric test suggested by Wald and Wolfowitz (1943). It is meant to test for correlation between Xt and X m , using the circular test statistic
test may be misleading for time series with strong trends, since R will then be too strongly influenced by the economically meaningless term X A -X T . A widely used parametric test for correlation between Xt and X,+1 involves the so-called von Neumann ratio as the test statistic and assumes joint normality of the observations of the sample. The ratio is defined as the mean square of first differences divided by the variance of the observations. Its distribution was established by von Neumann (1941), and tables for significance tests in small samples are given by Hart (1942). A parametric test, again based on a normal population, to determine whether X, is significantly correlated with Xt-} for any j is also available. The test statistic for j = L is the Lth noncircular autocorrelation coefficient computed from the sample, denoted by rL, that is, the simple correlation coefficient between the series X,, X,, • • • , X.V_L and the series XL+1, X L+2 , • • • , X y . Here rL is noncircular, since we do not identify XA>1 with X l , X v+2 with X 2 , etc. The Lth circular autocorrelation coefficient computed from the sample, r*L, is the simple correlation coefficient between the series Xl, X2, • • • , XN-i, XN a n d X L + 1 ,X L + 2 , - - ^ X ^ X ^ • • • , X L _ l 5 X L . T h e distribution of rL is not known, but the exact smallsample distribution of r*L has been derived by R. L. Anderson (1942) and can be used for an approximate test of the null hypothesis that X* and X,_ L are not correlated in the population. As a justification for approximating the distribution of rL with that of r*L, it can be argued that for large samples the influence of the circular terms becomes negligible. The relationship between the first autocorrelation coefficient and the von Neumann ratio (the von Neumann ratio equals 2N[1 — r*]/[N — 1]) has been investigated by T. W. Anderson (1948). More refined investigation of autocorrelation requires more refined statistical models. It was noted earlier that the general model of an economic time series is a stochastic process. An example of a stochastic process that is particularly useful in analyzing autocorrelation is the stochastic difference equation, or linear autoregressive process. The observed time series Xt,t=l, • • • , N, may have been generated by the pth-order linear autoregressive process: (1)
which for large N is normally distributed, with mean and variance as given by Wald and Wolfowitz. The null hypothesis tested is that the items of the series are independent. Unfortunately, the
Xt = a0
et,
the cii being constants and the et being nonautocorrelated random disturbances with zero mean and constant variance. Here Xt is seen to depend, in a complicated way, on its values for the previous p periods. Estimates of the parameters of (1) pro-
TIME SERIES: General vide information on the form of autocorrelation in the population from which the sample was obtained. Since (1) does define a stochastic process, the joint probability distribution of X t , • • • ,XM for any M can be found. If the joint probability distributions of X t , • • • , XM and Xt+i, • • • , XM+J are identical for all ; and for all choices of M, the process is said to be stationary. The values of the constants, at, i = 0, • • • , p, will determine whether or not (1) defines a stationary stochastic process. Should the process be stationary, maximum likelihood estimation of the parameters of (1) is equivalent to direct application of least squares to the equation. The estimators of the coefficients are consistent and normally distributed for large samples, but they are biased for small samples (Hurwicz 1950). The concept of weak stationarity is often useful when one is dealing primarily with first and second moments. If the variance of Xt exists for all t, the process Xt is said to be weakly stationary when (z) EXt does not depend on t and («) the covariance of Xt and Xs depends only on t - s. It follows from (ii) that for a weakly stationary process the variance of Xt does not depend on t. In practice the order of the stochastic difference equation to be fitted is unknown. However, Quenouille (1947) has provided a large-sample test for the goodness of fit of a linear autoregressive scheme. After the fitting of a pth-order difference equation, the Quenouille test determines whether a difference equation of higher order will better fit the sample. Correlation between autocorrelated series. Testing for correlation between two variables is often desired, but well-known tests for this purpose are generally based on the assumption that neither variable is autocorrelated. Since economic time series typically are autocorrelated, it is very important to have a test for correlation between two autocorrelated series. Orcutt and James (1948) have suggested a test based upon the idea that a set of N observations of two autocorrelated series is, in a certain sense, equivalent to a smaller number, n', of independent observations. Drawing upon earlier work by Bartlett (1935), they compute an approximation, valid in large samples, to the variance, V, of the sample correlation coefficient, r, between two autocorrelated series. If V < £, they show that n' is approximately equal to (V + 1)/V and that r approximately follows the t-distribution with n' — 2 degrees of freedom. The significance of r can then be tested, using this distribution. (For further discussion of and references to tests
53
for correlation between autocorrelated series, see Tintner 1952, pp. 247-250.) Autocorrelated residuals in regression. A special problem that frequently arises in regression studies of economic time series is the possibility of autocorrelation in the error term of a regression model. Once the regression function has been estimated by methods appropriate for a nonautocorrelated error term, it is desirable to test the residuals from the regression to determine whether or not the null hypothesis that there is in fact no autocorrelation in the disturbances can be accepted. The autocorrelation of residuals from fitted regression equations has been considered asymptotically by Moran (1948). Suppose the regression model relating variable X, to variable X2 is Xlt = a0
et ,
where a0 and az are constants and et represents the random disturbances at time t. We obtain estimates d0 and a., of a0 and a,, and we wish to use the residuals,
to test for autocorrelation of the et . We compute the first circular autocorrelation coefficient of the residuals : tf-i RI = E etet+i + $i$y. t=i
The significance of R: may be determined for large samples by a test involving the first two circular autocorrelation coefficients of X2 . In this case using the circular definition of R^ is probably not too damaging, since the residuals may well be homogeneous in time. But the autocorrelation coefficients for X2 are likely to be much influenced by the circular terms. The Durbin-Watson ratio (Durbin & Watson 1950-1951),
where zt is the residual at time t from a least squares regression with any number of independent variables, has been suggested as a test statistic for positive autocorrelation between zt and zt-\ . This ratio is related to the von Neumann ratio. Durbin and Watson have not established exact significance levels for d, but they do provide lower and upper bounds for various sample sizes and numbers of estimated parameters in the regression equation. If d exceeds the upper bound, the hypoth-
54
TIME SERIES: General
esis of positive autocorrelation in the disturbances must be accepted, whereas if d is less than the lower bound, this hypothesis must be rejected. Should d lie between the bounds, the test is inconclusive. An alternative approximate test for d has been suggested by Theil and Nagar (1961). R. L. Anderson and T. W. Anderson (1950) have established a test for autocorrelation of residuals from fitted Fourier series. [For additional information on autocorrelation, see MARKOV CHAINS; see also T. W. Anderson 1948; Cochrane & Orcutt 1949; Durbin I960; Parzen 1961; Quenouille 1947; Sargan 1961.]
series with very pronounced seasonal fluctuations. In addition, it is evident that this transformation is not appropriate for time series generated by stochastic difference-equation processes. The main objects of the variate difference method are to determine the difference series that best eliminates Mt and to estimate the variance of et . To accomplish the former, we compute the variance of the difference series of order k. Denote this variance as V fc . If Mt is nearly eliminated in the difference series of order kn , it can be shown that the following equalities should hold approximately :
Transformation of observations Since methods to deal with the class of stochastic processes that arise in economic time series are frequently not available, we are often forced to try to transform our observations in such a way that classical statistical procedures can legitimately be used. (Analogous transformations were mentioned above in the discussion of the logistic function.) Unfortunately, choosing the correct transformation requires knowledge of the underlying stochastic process. However, it is possible to indicate the transformations that are appropriate for various possible underlying stochastic processes, leaving it to the researcher to decide which type of stochastic process most likely generated his observations. Variate difference method. The variate difference method is a procedure for eliminating the systematic component from a time series composed of a systematic component and a random element. It does this by differencing the observations. The method has not been very popular in recent econometric applications, primarily because of its rather limited applicability, to be noted below. The method utilizes a somewhat primitive fundamental model of an economic time series. The series X t , t = 1, • • • , N, is assumed to be composed of two additive parts, namely, a "smooth" systematic part, Mt, and a random element, et. It is also assumed, perhaps unrealistically, that the mean value of et is zero, its variance is constant, and the et are not autocorrelated. If Mt is a polynomial function of time, then it can be eliminated from Xt by taking differences of the Xt of a sufficiently high order. If Mt is a sufficiently smooth function of time, it might be approximated by a polynomial in a finite interval, and taking differences of the Xt might reduce Mt sufficiently. The transformation of differencing the observations will not eliminate Mt to any marked degree if Mt is not sufficiently smooth. For example, the method is not applicable to certain monthly time
Thus, to determine whether the feth-order difference series eliminates Mt , we require a test for the equality of V7l. and V/m . Several tests have been suggested. O. Anderson (1929) and R. Zaycoff (1937) have given expressions for the standard error of V/£+1 — V7c . Thus, we might use the ratio of this difference to its standard error as the test statistic, a statistic that is normally distributed for large samples. Tintner (1940) indicated a quite inefficient small-sample test based upon systematic selection of items in the difference series in such a way that the items selected are independent. The exact distribution of V7v based upon a circular definition of the population has been established by Tintner (1955), providing an exact test (Rao & Tintner 1962). In practical applications we might use the exact distribution of the difference between the circularly defined variances as an approximation to the distribution of the difference between the noncircular variances, which in large samples will not differ significantly from that between the circular variances. Suppose we find that the fe,,th-order difference series does eliminate Mt ; then we may use as an estimator of the variance of et the variance of this series, namely, V fco . (For an alternative procedure, see Rao & Tintner 1963. For more information on the variate difference method, consult Durbin 1962; Grenander & Rosenblatt 1957; Wilks 1962, p. 526.) Transformations in multiple regression. One of the worst difficulties that plague empirical econometric research is autocorrelation of the residuals in regression studies of economic time series. Although the regression coefficients may be estimated without bias even if the residuals are autocorrelated, the standard errors of the coefficients obtained using classical least squares methods will not be valid. Suppose we estimate by least squares the regression function X l t = k0 + Wat + €t
TIME SERIES: General and find significant autocorrelation in the residuals, where Xu = kn + LX 2( . Then it can be shown that a valid estimator of the standard error of k2 is given by the classical estimator multiplied by the adjustment factor [1 + 2(r 1 R 1 + r,R2 + • • • ) ] * • In this formulation r, is the autocorrelation coefficient of et and et-i and R, is the autocorrelation coefficient of X.^ and X 2 .,-, : . Thus, this procedure requires knowledge of the correlograms of et and X 2f . If we were to assume that both of these variables were generated by a first-order linear autoregressive process (a simple Markov scheme), then we could use as estimators of the correlograms the first autocorrelation coefficients computed from the sample, say, rl and #1 . This would lead to the adjustment factor
55
However, it should be noted that eliminating trends in variables or introducing time as a separate variable in regression studies is really a confession of ignorance that is sometimes unavoidable. The relation that is being estimated must somehow have shifted over time, but rather than seek an explanation for this shifting, we simply eliminate it and estimate a relation that is stable over the period being considered. Autoregressive transformations. Cochrane and Orcutt (1949) have shown that autocorrelation in residuals can be eliminated by a simple transformation of variables if the residuals follow a simple Markov scheme. Assume that we want to fit, by the method of least squares, the relation (2)
,, = k0 + k2X2t + • • • +
+ ut
The ut are not independent but are known to follow the simple Markov scheme u, = Aut-i + vt,
An alternative to adjusting the standard errors in this manner is to transform the observations in such a way that autocorrelation in the residuals is removed, so that classical least squares estimation can legitimately be applied. Elimination of trends. Autocorrelation of residuals is frequently due to trends in the variables included in time series regression studies. Hence, econometricians often transform their observations by taking deviations from trends. This would generally necessitate fitting trend functions to each of the variables, although that can be avoided in some instances. For example, the variate difference method might be used to find a difference series for each variable that sufficiently eliminates the systematic trend components. First differences would be called for if each variable had a linear trend as its systematic component (an exponential trend, if we are working with logarithms of the variables). An important theorem, due to Frisch and Waugh (1933), also establishes a rather simple procedure for handling trends in variables. Suppose that all variables in the regression follow linear trends. Then it can be shown that the regression results obtained after transforming the variables into deviations from trends are the same as those obtained by using the original variables but including time itself as an independent variable in the regression. This theorem has been generalized by Tintner (1952, p. 301 ) to cases in which all variables have trends that are orthogonal polynomials of time or generally orthogonal functions of time, thus extending the applicability of the method.
where A is a constant, |A| < 1, and the vt have mean value zero, have finite and constant variance, and are not autocorrelated. If we make the transformations Yit = Xit — AXi.t-i, then least squares can legitimately be applied to the linear relationship for the transformed variables : (3) Y l f = fe 0 (l - A ) +fe 2 Y 2 ,+ • • • +kpYpt + vt. It should be noted that this transformation reduces to taking first differences of the observations when A is very close to unity, thus establishing a link between the autoregressive transformation and the variate difference method. A difficulty in applying this method is that it requires knowledge of the constant A, which characterizes the stochastic process generating ut . This difficulty can be surmounted in the following manner (Johnston 1963, pp. 192-195) : We first fit (2) by the method of least squares and compute the residuals ut = Xlt — Xlt. We then estimate A by applying least squares to ut =
vt.
Using A, the estimator of A, to transform the observations, we fit (3) by least squares and test the residuals vt = Yit — Ylt for autocorrelation. If the autocorrelation of these residuals is not significant, we have found a reasonably good estimator of A, and our task is completed. If the autocorrelation is significant, we use the residuals vt to obtain a new estimator of A by fitting
56
TIME SERIES: General
and repeat the above steps. We continue this process until the residuals computed from our estimator of (3) are not significantly autocorrelated. Stochastic processes in econometrics The most promising approach to the satisfactory analysis of economic time series is the explicit use of stochastic processes in econometric research. Although some headway has been made along these lines, the results achieved thus far are not very satisfactory. In statistical analysis of time series, we wish to use our observations to estimate the parameters of the underlying stochastic process that generated the time series. But in order to use a small sample to make statistical inferences concerning the values of population parameters, we must know the small-sample distributions of the estimators employed. Unfortunately, considerable mathematical difficulty is encountered in determining the small-sample distributions of parameter estimators of many types of stochastic processes. Stochastic processes have found wide and diverse applications in economic time series analysis. Dynamic economic problems are frequently analyzed with the aid of dynamic models that can be characterized as stochastic processes (see, for example, Adelman & Adelman 1959; de Cani 1961; F. M. Fisher 1962; Granger & Hatanaka 1964; Morgenstern 1961; Tinbergen 1939). Stochastic processes have been employed to analyze the formation of commodity and stock prices (Cootner 1964; Kendall 1953; Quenouille 1957). Much effort has been directed toward finding an explanation of the income distribution in terms of stochastic processes, as it is a distribution that is very skew and fits badly into the traditional analysis of statistical income distributions [see SIZE DISTRIBUTIONS IN ECONOMICS]. Labor mobility problems have been investigated with the aid of Markov processes (Blumen et al. 1955). Prais and Houthakker (1955) employed stochastic processes involving the lognormal distribution in analyzing household budgets. Stochastic processes have also been used quite successfully in operations research, and it is hoped that the same or related methods will be useful in analyses of economic time series (Bharucha-Reid I960; Takacs 1960). Estimation of parameters. To illustrate the application of maximum likelihood estimation to stochastic processes, consider the Poisson process [Fisz (1954) 1963, p. 488; see also QUEUES]. Let N(£) be the number of events occurring during the time period from 0 to t, where N(£) can take on values 0, 1, 2, • • • . We assume that N(£) has inde-
pendent and homogeneous increments, i.e., that N(£ 2 ) — N(£ a ) is independent of, and has the same distribution as, N(£ 2 + fe) — N(£ t + /z) for all choices of £, and £ 2 , £2 > £1, and for all choices of h greater than zero. The probability of the occurrence of more than one event in the time interval (t, t + A£) tends sufficiently fast to zero as A£ -> 0. The transition probability, Pa(tl, £ 2 ), is the probability that N(£,) = i if N(£,) = j and can be written = exp[-L(t 2 -*, where L, the parameter to be estimated, is the average number of events occurring per unit of time. Suppose we have observations on N ( £ ) for £ = £ 1; t, , • • - , £ „ and denote N(£ f c ) = j k , k = 1, • • • , n. The likelihood function is then
Maximizing P with respect to L yields the maximum likelihood estimator, L = ;'„/£„ . Large-sample or asymptotic distributions of maximum likelihood estimators have been established for simple Markov processes (T. W. Anderson 1959). Consider a first-order stochastic difference equation, Xe = aXi_! + ut , where a is a constant to be estimated from the sample Xt , • — ,XS. Assume that the initial value, X0 , is a constant and that ut is a nonautocorrelated normally distributed random variable with zero mean and constant and finite variance. The maximum likelihood estimator of a is
EX? t=l If a I < 1 (in which case Xt is a stationary time series or a time series with no trend), the expression (a — a) V~N is, under wide conditions, asymptotically normally distributed with mean zero. Using this result, approximate confidence interval estimates of a could be made for very large samples. More interesting is the case in which a > I . Then X t is an evolutionary time series — the stochastic equivalent of an economic time series with exponential trend — and the expression a2- 1 has a Cauchy distribution, a distribution whose mean and higher moments do not exist. However,
TIME SERIES: General if in addition to the above assumptions it is assumed that X0 = 0 and ut is normally distributed, then a is a maximum likelihood estimator, and the expression (a-a)
is asymptotically normal and provides a basis for approximate confidence interval estimates for very large samples. Asymptotic distributions such as these could be used as rough approximations to small-sample distributions of this estimator, but it is to be hoped that exact small-sample distributions will be established, so that they would be immediately applicable to the analysis of short economic time series. Multiple stochastic processes. Multiple stochastic processes arise frequently in econometric research. For example, in dynamic business cycle models we often attempt to explain the cyclical behavior of consumption, investment, and income by a system of equations in which the current value of each of these endogenous variables is related to its own lagged values, to lagged values of other endogenous variables, to current and lagged exogenous variables, and to a random term. The interdependence of economic variables leads us to analyze a particular time series in the context of a system of equations that constitutes a multiple stochastic process. [See ECONOMETRIC MODELS, AGGREGATE.] Not enough is known about the estimation of multiple stochastic processes. In econometric work, lagged endogenous variables are frequently handled like given constants, a treatment which is plainly inadequate. Also, small-sample distributions have not yet been sufficiently explored. Quenouille ( 1957, p. 70) has investigated the problems of estimating a multiple Markov scheme. This is a relatively simple multiple stochastic process, composed of a system of first-order stochastic linear difference equations. As an example, we might wish to estimate the constants ai} and bij in the system a n X l f + av,X.,t + b-LiX-i.t-i + br
with the sets of observations X1X , • • • , X1A- and X2i , • • • , X2N . We assume that e, and e.2 are random variables with zero means and constant and finite variances and that they are independent over time. Under certain conditions, we can solve for Xu and X.,t , rewriting the system as follows: Xlt = UuXi.t-i + Ui2X2.t-, + v,,e,t + v^e,t , X2t = u2iXlit-\ + u.J2X2it-i + v.2]elt + v«2e.,t .
57
Defining the simple covariances as j t-\
and the lagged covariances as 1
*
'ij ~ TV - I / j
X X
" *,*-i»
the maximum likelihood estimators of the ui} are found by solving the system of equations C
11W11 +
C
12W21 ~
C
ll >
C 2 Ai + C 22 W 21 = C'21 ,
c
iA* + c12w22 = c; 2 ,
C
21^12
I ^22 W 22
=
C 22 '
It is also possible to obtain standard errors of the estimated w,- ; -, but it is not possible to obtain estimators of the a i; and bi}•, In order to accomplish this, further assumptions about the coefficients have to be made. (See, for example, F. M. Fisher 1965. For a further discussion of multiple stochastic processes, see Bartlett 1955. Works containing additional information on the statistical treatment of stochastic processes as well as useful references to the vast literature on this topic are Moran 1951; 1953; Rosenblatt 1962.) GERHARD TINTNER [See also LINEAR HYPOTHESES, article on REGRESSION.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
ADELMAN, IRMA; and ADELMAN, FRANK L. (1959) 1965 The Dynamic Properties of the Klein-Goldberger Model. Pages 278-306 in American Economic Association, Readings in Business Cycles. Homewood, 111.: Irwin. -» First published in Volume 27 of Econometrica. ANDERSON, OSKAR N. 1929 Die Korrelationsrechnung in der Konjunkturforschung: Ein Beitrag zur Analyse von Zeitreihen. Bonn: Schroeder.
ANDERSON, R. L. 1942 Distribution of the Serial Correlation Coefficient. Annals of Mathematical Statistics 13:1-13. ANDERSON, R. L. 1954 The Problems of Autocorrelation in Regression Analysis. Journal of the American Statistical Association 49:113-129. -> A correction was published in Volume 50, page 1331. ANDERSON, R. L.; and ANDERSON, T. W. 1950 Distribution of the Circular Serial Correlation Coefficient for Residuals From a Fitted Fourier Series. Annals of Mathematical Statistics 21:59-81. ANDERSON, T. W. 1948 On the Theory of Testing Serial Correlation. Skandinavisk aktuarietidskrift 31:88-116. ANDERSON, T. W. 1959 On Asymptotic Distributions of Estimates of Parameters of Stochastic Difference Equations. Annals of Mathematical Statistics 30:676-687. ANDERSON, T. W. 1962 The Choice of the Degree of a Polynomial Regression as a Multiple Decision Problem. Annals of Mathematical Statistics 33:255-265.
58
TIME SERIES: General
ANDERSON, T. W. 1964 Some Approaches to the Statistical Analysis of Time Series. Australian Journal of Statistics 6, no. 1:1-11. BARTLETT, M. S. 1935 Some Aspects of the Time-correlation Problem in Regard to Tests of Significance. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 98:536-543. BARTLETT, M. S. (1955) 1962 An Introduction to Stochastic Processes, With Special Reference to Methods and Applications. Cambridge Univ. Press. BHARUCHA-REID, ALBERT T. 1960 Elements of the Theory of Markov Processes and Their Applications. New York: McGraw-Hill. BLACKMAN, R. B.; and TUKEY, J. W. (1958) 1959 The Measurement of Power Spectra, From the Point of View of Communications Engineering. New York: Dover. -» First published in the Bell System Technical Journal. BLUMEN, ISADORE; KOGAN, MARVIN; and MCCARTHY, PHILIP 1955 The Industrial Mobility of Labor as a Probability Process. Cornell Studies in Industrial and Labor Relations, Vol. 6. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press. BRUCKMANN, G.; and PFANZAGL, J. 1960 Literaturbericht iiber die Zerlegung saisonabhangiger Zeitreihen. Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Versicherungsmathematik, Blatter 4:301-309. COCHRANE, DONALD; and ORCUTT, G. H. 1949 Application of Least Squares Regression to Relationships Containing Auto-correlated Error Terms. Journal of the American Statistical Association 44:32-61. COOTNER, PAUL H. (editor) 1964 The Random Character of Stock Market Prices. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press. COWLES COMMISSION FOR RESEARCH IN ECONOMICS 1953 Studies in Econometric Method. Edited by William C. Hood and Tjalling C. Koopmans. New York: Wiley. DAVIS, HAROLD T. 1941 The Analysis of Economic Time Series. Cowles Commission for Research in Economics, Monograph No. 6. Bloomington, Ind.: Principia. DE CANI, JOHN S. 1961 On the Construction of Stochastic Models of Population Growth and Migration. Journal of Regional Science 3, no. 2:1-13. DURBIN, J. R. 1960 Estimation of Parameters in Timeseries Regression Models. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B 22:139-153. DURBIN, J. R. 1962 Trend Elimination by Moving-average and Variate-difference Filters. Institut International de Statistique, Bulletin 39:131-141. DURBIN, J. R.; and WATSON, G. S. 1950-1951 Testing for Serial Correlation in Least Squares Regression. Parts 1-2. Biometrika 37:409-428; 38:159-178. FISHER, FRANKLIN M. 1962 A Priori Information and Time Series Analysis: Essays in Economic Theory and Measurement. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing. FISHER, FRANKLIN M. 1965 Dynamic Structure and Estimation in Economy-wide Econometric Models. Pages 589-635 in James S. Duesenberry et al., The Brookings Quarterly Econometric Model of the United States. Chicago: Rand McNally. FISHER, R. A. (1925) 1958 Statistical Methods for Research Workers. 13th ed. New York: Hafner. -» Previous editions were also published by Oliver and Boyd. Fisz, MAREKA (1954) 1963 Probability Theory and Mathematical Statistics. 3d ed. New York: Wiley. -> First published as Rachunek prawdopodobienstwa i statystyka matematyczna. FOSTER, F. G.; and STUART, ALAN 1954 Distributionfree Tests in Time-series Based on the Breaking of
Records. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B 16:1-22. FRISCH, RAGNAR; and WAUGH, FREDERICK V. 1933 Partial Time Regressions as Compared With Individual Trends. Econometrica 1:387-401. GRANGER, CLIVE W. J.; and HATANAKA, M. 1964 Spectral Analysis of Economic Time Series. Princeton Univ. Press. GRENANDER, ULF 1957 Modern Trends in Time Series Analysis. Sankhya. 18:149-158. GRENANDER, ULF; and ROSENBLATT, MURRAY 1957 Statistical Analysis of Stationary Time Series. New York: Wiley. HANNAN, EDWARD J. (1960) 1962 Time Series Analysis. New York: Wiley. HANNAN, EDWARD J. 1963 The Estimation of Seasonal Variations in Economic Time Series. Journal of the American Statistical Association 58:31-44. HART, B. I. 1942 Tabulation of the Probabilities for the Ratio of the Mean Square Successive Difference to the Variance. Annals of Mathematical Statistics 13:207214. HEMELRIJK, JAN 1958 Distribution-free Tests Against Trend and Maximum Likelihood Estimates of Ordered Parameters. Institut International de Statistique, Bulletin 36:15-25. HOTELLING, HAROLD 1927 Differential Equations Subject to Error, and Population Estimates. Journal of the American Statistical Association 22:283-314. HURWICZ, LEONARD 1950 Least-squares Bias in Time Series. Pages 365-383 in Tjalling C. Koopmans (editor), Statistical Inference in Dynamic Economic Models. New York: Wiley. JENKINS, G. M.; and PRIESTLEY, M. B. 1957 The Spectral Analysis of Time-series. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B 19:1-12. JOHNSTON, JOHN 1963 Econometric Methods. New York: McGraw-Hill. KENDALL, M. G. 1938 A New Measure of Rank Correlation. Biometrika 30:81-93. -» This introduces the T coefficient. Its use in testing for trend is discussed in Kendall 1948. KENDALL, M. G. (1948) 1963 Rank Correlation Methods. 3d ed., rev. & enl. New York: Hafner. KENDALL, M. G. 1953 The Analysis of Economic Timeseries. Part 1: Prices. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A 116:11-25. KENDALL, M. G.; and STUART, ALAN (1946) 1961 The Advanced Theory of Statistics. Volume 2: Inference and Relationship. New ed. New York: Hafner; London: Griffin. -> The first edition was written by Kendall alone. KOOPMANS, TJALLING C. (editor) 1950 Statistical Inference in Dynamic Economic Models. New York: Wiley. KUZNETS, SIMON 1934 Time Series. Volume 14, pages 629-636 in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences. New York: Macmillan. MALINVAUD, EDMOND (1964) 1966 Statistical Methods in Econometrics. Chicago: Rand McNally. -» First published in French. MANN, HENRY B. 1945 Nonparametric Tests Against Trend. Econometrica 13:245-259. MANN, HENRY B.; and WALD, A. 1943 On the Statistical Treatment of Linear Stochastic Difference Equations. Econometrica 11:173-220. MORAN, P. A. P. 1948 Some Theorems on Time Series. Part 2: The Significance of the Serial Correlation Coefficient. Biometrika 35:255-260.
TIME SERIES: Advanced Problems MORAN, P. A. P. 1951 Estimation Methods for Evolutive Processes. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B 13:141-146. MORAN, P. A. P. 1953 The Estimation of the Parameters of a Birth-and-death Process. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B 15:241-245. MORGENSTERN, OSKAR 1961 A New Look at Economic Time Series Analysis. Pages 261-272 in Hugo Hegeland (editor), Money, Growth, and Methodology, and Other Essays in Economics. Lund (Sweden): Gleerup. NERLOVE, MARC 1964 Spectral Analysis of Seasonal Adjustment Procedures. Econometrica 32:241-286. ORCUTT, G. H.; and JAMES, S. F. 1948 Testing the Significance of Correlation Between Time Series. Biometrika 35:397-413. PARZEN, EMANUEL (1961) 1965 Stochastic Processes. San Francisco: Holden-Day. PHILLIPS, A. W. 1959 The Estimation of Parameters in Systems of Stochastic Differential Equations. Biometrika 46:67-76. PRAIS, S. J.; and HOUTHAKKER, H. S. 1955 The Analysis of Family Budgets With an Application to Two British Surveys Conducted in 1937-1939 and Their Detailed Results. Cambridge Univ. Press. QUENOUILLE, M. H. 1947 A Large Sample Test for the Goodness of Fit of Autoregressive Schemes. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A 110:123-129. QUENOUILLE, M. H. 1957 The Analysis of Multiple Timeseries. New York: Hafner. RAO, J. N. K.; and TINTNER, GERHARD 1962 The Distribution of the Ratio of the Variances of Variate Differences in the Circular Case. Sankhyd 24A: 385-394. RAO, J. N. K.; and TINTNER, GERHARD 1963 On the Variate Difference Method. Australian Journal of Statistics 5:106-116. RHODES, E. C. 1940 Population Mathematics III. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A 103:362-387. ROSENBLATT, MURRAY 1962 Random Processes. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. SARGAN, J. D. 1961 The Maximum Likelihood Estimation of Economic Relationships With Autoregressive Residuals. Econometrica 29:414-426. SCHUSTER, ARTHUR 1906 On the Periodicities of Sunspots. Royal Society of London, Philosophical Transactions Series A 206:69-100. SLUTSKY, EUGEN E. (1927) 1937 The Summation of Random Causes as the Source of Cyclic Processes. Econometrica 5:105-146. -> First published in Russian. Reprinted in 1960 in Slutsky's Izbrannye trudy. Symposium on Spectral Approach to Time Series. 1957 Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B 19: 1-63. Symposium on Stochastic Processes. 1949 Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B 11:150-282. SYMPOSIUM ON TIME SERIES ANALYSIS, BROWN UNIVERSITY, 1962 1963 Proceedings. Edited by Murray Rosenblatt. New York: Wiley. TAKACS, LAJOS 1960 Stochastic Processes: Problems and Solutions. New York: Wiley. THEIL, H.; and NAGAR, A. L. 1961 Testing the Independence of Regression Disturbances. Journal of the American Statistical Association 56:793-806. TINBERGEN, JAN 1939 Statistical Testing of Businesscycle Theories. Volume 2: Business Cycles in the United States of America: 1919-1932. Geneva: League of Nations, Economic Intelligence Service. TINTNER, GERHARD 1940 The Variate Difference Method. Bloomington, Ind.: Principia.
59
TINTNER, GERHARD 1952 Econometrics. New York: Wiley. TINTNER, GERHARD 1955 The Distribution of the Variances of Variate Differences in the Circular Case. Metron 17, no. 3/4:43-52. TINTNER, GERHARD 1960 Handbuch der Okonometrie. Berlin: Springer. VON NEUMANN, JOHN 1941 Distribution of the Ratio of the Mean Square Successive Difference to the Variance. Annals of Mathematical Statistics 12:367-395. WALD, A.; and WOLFOWITZ, J. 1943 An Exact Test for Randomness in the Non-parametric Case Based on Serial Correlation. Annals of Mathematical Statistics 14:378-388. WALLIS, W. ALLEN; and MOORE, GEOFFREY H. 1941 A Significance Test for Time Series Analysis. Journal of the American Statistical Association 36:401-409. WHITTLE, P. 1951 Hypothesis Testing in Time Series Analysis. Uppsala (Sweden): Almqvist & Wiksell. WHITTLE, P. 1963 Prediction and Regulation by Linear Least-square Methods. London: English Universities Press. WILKS, S. S. 1962 Mathematical Statistics. New York: Wiley. WOLD, HERMAN (1938) 1954 A Study in the Analysis of Stationary Time Series. 2d ed. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. ZAYCOFF, RASHKO 1936 V'rkhu razlaganeto na statisticheski redove po vreme na tri slagaemi (Uber die Zerlegung statistischer Zeitreihen in drei Komponenten). Sofia, Universitet, Statisticheski Institut za Stopanski Prouchvaniia Trudove [1936] no. 4:1-22. ZAYCOFF, RASHKO 1937 V'rkhu izkliuchvaneto na sluchainata slagaema posr"dstvom' metoda "Variatedifference" (Uber die Ausschaltung der zufalligen Komponente nach der "Variate-difference"-Methode). Sofia, Universitet, Statisticheski Institut za Stopanski Prouchvaniia Trudove [1937] no. 1:1-46. II ADVANCED PROBLEMS
Numerical data often occur in the form of a time series, that is, a sequence of observations on a variable taken either continuously or at regular intervals of time. As examples consider records of economic variables (prices, interest rates, sales, unemployment), meteorological records, electroencephalograms, and population and public health records. In contrast to much experimental data, the consecutive observations of a time series are not in general independent, and the fascination of time series analysis lies in the utilization of observed dependence to deduce the way the value of a variable (say, steel production) can be shown to be in part determined by the past values of the same variable, or of other variables (say, demand for automobiles). In the so-called discrete time case, observations are taken at regular intervals of time. The common interval of time can be taken as the unit, so that the value of a variable x at time t can be denoted by xt, where t takes the values • • • , —2, — 1, 0, 1, 2, • • • .
60
TIME SERIES: Advanced Problems
Of course, in practice one observes only a finite set of values, say xl, x2, • • • , xn, but it is useful to imagine that the series can in principle extend indefinitely far back and forward in time. For this reason t is allowed to run to infinity in both directions. (Of course, sometimes one observes a phenomenon continuously, so that x is measured for all t rather than just at intervals—such a process is referred to as continuous. However, since the discrete case is by far the more frequent in the social sciences, this discussion will be limited to that case.) Suppose that one has a model which explains how the xt series should develop. The model is termed a process and is denoted by {xt}; if some of the rules it specifies are probabilistic ones, it is called a stochastic process. Definition of a stationary process One class of stochastic processes is of particular importance, both in practice and in theory: this is the class of stationary processes. A stationary process is one that is in a state of statistical equilibrium, so that its statistical pattern of behavior does not change with time. Formally, the requirement is that for any set of instants of time, t a , t2, • • • , tn, and any time lag, s, the joint distribution of xtl,xt2, • • • , x t > l must be the same as that of xtl+s, xtz+a, • • • , xt>i+s. Thus, xl and x5 must have the same univariate distribution, ( x { , x 2 ) and (x-,, x 6 ) must have the same bivariate distribution, and so on. The assumption of stationarity is a strong one, but when it can be made it greatly simplifies understanding and analysis of a process. An intuitive reason for the simplification is that a stationary process provides a kind of hidden replication, a structure that does not deviate too far from the still more special assumptions of independence and identical distribution, assumptions that are ubiquitous in statistical theory. Whether the stationarity assumption is realistic for a particular process depends on how near the process is indeed to statistical equilibrium. For example, because most economies are evolving, economic series can seldom be regarded as stationary, but sometimes a transformation of the variable produces a more nearly stationary series (see the section on "smoothing" a series, below). Stationarity implies that if xt has an expectation, then this expectation must be independent of £, so that
(1)
£(*.)=/*>
say, for all t. Furthermore, if xt and xt.g have a
covariance, then this covariance can depend only on the relative time lag, s, so that (2)
COV(xt,
The important function Ta is known as the autocovariance function. Processes subject only to the restrictions (1) and (2), and not to any other of the restrictions that stationarity implies, are known as wide-sense stationary processes. They are important theoretically, but the idea of wide-sense stationarity is important also because in practice one is often content to work with first-order and second-order moments alone, if for no other reason than to keep computation manageable. This survey will be restricted to stationary processes in the strict sense, unless otherwise indicated. Note that t need not necessarily mean time. One might, for example, be considering variations in thickness along a thread or in vehicle density along a highway; then t would be a spatial coordinate. Some particular processes. One of the simplest processes of all is a sequence of independent random variables, {et}. If the et have a common distribution, then the process is strictly stationary— this is the kind of sequence often postulated for the "residuals" of a regression or of a model in experimental design. If one requires of {e(} merely that its elements have constant mean and variance, ra and o-2, and be uncorrelated, then the process is a widesense stationary process. From now on {et} will denote a process of just this latter type. Often such a process of "residuals" is presumed to have zero mean (that is, m — 0); however, this will not always be assumed here. What is of interest in most series is just that the observations are not independent or even uncorrelated. A model such as (3)
xt = atXt-i +
(a first-order autoregression^) takes one by a very natural first step from an uncorrelated sequence, {e^}, to an autocorrelated sequence, { x t } . Here a is a numerical constant whose value may or may not be known, and the term axt-i introduces a dependence between observations. Such a model is physically plausible in many situations; it might, for example, crudely represent the level of a lake year by year, axf..i representing the amount of water retained from the previous year and ef a random inflow. A common type of econometric model is a vector version of (3), in which xt,et are vectors and a is a matrix. If observations begin at time T, then the series
TIME SERIES: Advanced Problems starts with XT , xT+1 is axT + e r+ i, xT+2 is a?xT + acT+i + £ r+2 , and in general, for t ^ T, t-r-i
(4)
=Z fc=0
past disturbances. The sequence bk is the transient response of the system to a single unit disturbance. The relation between the coefficients ak and bk can be expressed neatly in generating function form:
If a; <1 and the model has been operative from the indefinitely distant past, then one can let T tend to —oo in (4) and obtain a solution for xt in terms of the "disturbing variables" et : (5)
The condition a\
does not converge in mean square as T tends to -oo; that is, there does not exist a random variable £ such that E(%T - £ ) 2 ^ 0.) The series [xt] generated by (5) is stationary, and one verifies that
m I -a
(6) f V\ I i //
N T~* — T"1 — /-»r\Tr ('V -v 1 e — 1-s — CUV Ix Jit . Jif-s 1 — I-i
tr'cr _
o '
a2
where m and
expressing xt in terms of its own immediate past and a stationary residual, et. When p= 1, (8) and (3) are the same except for trivia of notation: a0 and a, in (8) correspond to 1 and —a in (3). When p > 1, a process of type (8) can generate the quasi-periodic variations so often seen in time series. Of course, this is not the only model that can generate such quasi-periodic oscillations (one might, for example, consider a nonlinear process or a Markov chain), but it is probably the simplest type of model that does so. Corresponding to the passage from (3) to (5), process (8) can be given the moving-average representation
CO - \ ~ /
xt = Z
Je=o
which represents xf as a linear superposition of
1
-1
i—A
~«~
A/ \ -*1 \ ^ /
fc=0
p V»
A, akzK
r.
fc=0
For example, if z is set equal to 0, then b0 = if the functions are differentiated once and z is again set equal to 0, then £>, = —aja\. (Discussions of time series sooner or later require some knowledge of complex variables. An introduction to the subject is given in MacRobert 1917.) The necessary and sufficient condition for series (9) to converge to a proper random variable and for the resulting {xt} series to be stationary is that A(z), considered as a function of a complex variable z, have all its zeros outside the unit circle; this is again a stability condition on the relation (8). If, however, the stability condition is not fulfilled, relations such as (8) can still provide realistic models for some of the nonstationary series encountered in practice. A relation such as (9) is said to express {xt} as a moving average of {et}- There are, of course, many other important types of process, particularly the general Markov process [see MARKOV CHAINS] and the point processes (see Bartlett 1963), but the simple linear processes described in this section are typical of those that are useful for many time series analyses. Autocovariance function The autocovariance function, F s , defined in (2) gives a qualitative idea of the decay of statistical dependence in the process with increasing time lag; a more detailed examination of it can tell a good deal about the structure of the process. A key result is the following: Suppose that {xt} is a moving average of a process [yt],
xt = Z
(H)
k
where the summation is not necessarily restricted to nonnegative values of k, although in most physical applications it will be. Denote the autocovariances of the two processes by r(sx) r ( / } . Then
(12)
<*> = y
S
— t-J i
(9)
61
j l c
j-fc+
*
so that
(13)
= (Z V) (Z
62
TIME SERIES: Advanced Problems
a generating function relation that will be written in the form
If relation (11) defines a stationary process of finite variance, then (14) is valid for z| = 1 at least. A deduction from (14) and (10) is that for the autoregression (8) the autocovariance generating function is a-'
(15)
A(z)A(z-')
By calculating the coefficient of zs in the expansion of this function on the circle \z = 1 one obtains P., ; for process (3) one obtains the result (7) as before; for the second-order process with a0 = 1 one obtains
waters, a problem for which it was natural to consider a model of the type
(19)
xt = 1C A; sin cos
a «+l
08+1
2s ) ^
0,
s
_ o- 2 {sin[(s+l)0]- P 4 sin[(s- 1)0]} 1- > 2 1 -22cos20 + 4sin<9
The autocovariance, Ts , has a peak near a lag, s, of approximately 27T/0, indicating strong positive correlation between values of xt and xt-s for this value of lag. The nearer the damping factor, p, lies to unity, the stronger the correlation. This is an indication of what one might call a quasiperiodicity in the xt series, of "period" 27T/0, the kind of irregular periodicity that produces the "trade cycles" of economic series. Such disturbed periodicities are no less real for not being strict. Either from (15) or from the fact that CQV(Xt-i, € t ) =
n
The approximation lies in the use of rr
where or1, /3-1 are the zeros of A(z). If these zeros are complex, say, a, ft = p exp (±z#), then (16) has the oscillatory form ;
ts
\
= -r---j^-j -^- ( -z=- — ./ (1 — a/3 ) ( a — /3 ) \ 1 — a2 1 — (32 /
v
+ et .
2 v-A =— \ n
— x /
+ ]CC sin
That is, the series is represented as the sum of a number of harmonic components and an uncorrelated residual. If the frequencies, toy (corresponding to lunar and diurnal variations and so forth), are known, so that the A, and ay are to be estimated, then on the basis of an observed series x1}x2, • • • , xn the least square estimators of the coefficients By and Cy are approximately
(16) 0-2
+ ctj ) + e(
y pa ^ 2L >
h *- 2
E PA s o, t=\ where Pt and Qt are any two of the functions of time cos (w/t), sin (wyt) (;' = 1, 2, • • • ) . In this approximation, terms of relative order n~J are neglected. The squared amplitude, A2} = B 2 + C2., is thus estimated approximately by
(20)
—-^y^ y^ xsxt cos [o>y(s —t)]. /i . ' w „ *=1
t=l
This can also be written in the form
0,
it can be shown that for the autoregression (8)
(18)
0,
0.
These are the Yule-Walker relations, which provide a convenient way of calculating the Ys from the coefficients, ak. This procedure will be reversed below, and (18) will be used to estimate the ak from estimates of the autocovariances. Spectral theory Some of the first attempts at time series analysis concerned the prediction of tidal variation of coastal
which is mathematically (although not computationally) convenient. The importance of K] is that it measures the decrease in residual sum of squares (that is, the improvement in fit of model (19)) obtained by fitting terms in cos(co ; t) and sin(co,t). The larger this quantity, the greater the contribution that the harmonic component of frequency, coy, makes to the variation of xt. For this reason, if the coy are unknown, one can search for periodicities (see below) by calculating a quantity analogous to (20) for variable &>: the periodogram
TIME SERIES: Advanced Problems (24)
(21)
x x cos [&>(s — -TT / ^ / j s t
8=1
t=l
=— n
An unusually large value of f n (to) at a particular frequency suggests the presence of a harmonic component at that frequency. It is an empirical fact that few series are of the type (19): in general, one achieves much greater success by fitting structural models such as an autoregressive one. Even for the autoregressive model, however, or, indeed, for any stationary process, an analogue of representation (19) called the spectral representation holds. Here the sum is replaced by an integral. This integral gives an analysis of xt into different frequency components; for stationary series the amplitudes of different components are uncorrelated. In recent work the spectral representation turns out to be of central importance: the amplitudes of frequency components have simple statistical properties and transform in a particularly simple fashion if the process is subjected to a moving-average transformation (see eq. (26)); the frequency components themselves are often of physical significance. So even in the general case the periodogram fn(o)) provides an empirical measure of the amount of variation in the series around frequency w. Its expected value for large rz, the spectral density function (s.d.f.),
=lim
l --
n
j exp (-za>s)E (
= 2 E(xtxt-s ) exp ( — IMS ) , S = -00
provides the corresponding theoretical measure for a given process. If the xt have been reduced to zero mean (which, in fact, affects 0(o>) oiuy f°r w = 0). then the spectral density function becomes
(23) a
=flf[exp(-io>)].
There is a relation reciprocal to (23), the spectral representation of the autocovariance,
exp (—£
N
63
) = 1L r s exp(— icos),
nd, as can be seen from (13) and (14), this is °nly a trivial modification of the autocovariance generating function, #(z), already encountered. In fact,
(25)
r, =
277
exp (IMS
In more general cases $(ey) maY fail to exist for certain values, and $(w)do) must be replaced by dF(at') in (25), where F(w) is the nondecreasing spectral distribution function. An important property of spectral representations is the simplicity of their transformation under moving-average transformations of the process; relation (14) can be rewritten (26)
<J>,(°0 = B[exp(iw)]B[exp(-iG>)]),
showing that the effect of the moving-average operation (11) is to scale each frequency component up or down individually, by a factor |B[exp(zw)]| 2 . So, if for the autoregression with spectral density function determined by (15) the polynomial A(z) has zeros at p-1 exp (±0), and p is near unity, then <^((w) will have peaks near o> = ±9, indicating a quasiperiodicity of "period" 2-77/0. Note that for an uncorrelated series $(o)) is constant—all frequencies are equally represented on the average. For an autoregressive series $(&>) is variable but finite—this is an example of a process with continuous spectrum. A process of type (19) has a constant background term in (f> owing to the "noise," et, but also has infinite peaks at the values (o = ±a)j, these constituting a line spectrum component. For a discrete series one need only consider frequencies in the range —77 < a) ^TT, since with observations at unit intervals of time the frequencies 277S + a) (s integral) cannot be distinguished one from the other. This is the aliasing effect, which can occasionally confuse an analysis. If, however, the series has little variation of frequency greater than 77 (that is, of period less than two time units), then the effect is not serious, for the higher frequencies that could cause confusion hardly occur. Effect of "smoothing" a series—a caution. In order to isolate the "trend" in a series, {xt}, it has sometimes been common to derive a smoothed series, {xt}, by an averaging operation such as
(27)
2m + 1
Xt-Tc ,
although more elaborate and more desirable types of average are often used. In terms of frequency, the effect of the operation
64
TIME SERIES: Advanced Problems
1.00
GAIN FUNCTION
(l) b \
(2)
(3)'
FREQUENCY o)
Figure 1 — The gain functions for three linear operations on a time series a. Curve (2) represents the gain function for the ideal filter passing periods greater than five time units (frequencies less than 2ir/5). b. Curve (1) represents the gain function for a five-term uniform average (formula (27) with m = 2). c. Curve (3) represents the gain function for a finite moving average approximating the ideal filter (the average with weights given by (30) using u0 = 2ir/5, but truncated at fe = ± 10).
(27) is to multiply the spectral density function by a factor B[exp(z<w)]B[exp( —ito)], where (28)
sinjYra LV (2m
This function is graphed as the dotted curve (1) in Figure 1 and is known as the gain function of the transformation (27). Now, if the purpose of "trend extraction" is to eliminate the high frequencies from a series—that is, to act as a "low-pass filter"—then the ideal gain factor would correspond to the square-shouldered solid curve (2) in Figure 1. (A gain factor is sometimes referred to as a "window.") The function (28) obviously departs considerably from this ideal. To obtain a moving-average transformation (29)
— z-i
which acts as a perfect low-pass filter for the range —
The fact that these coefficients decrease rather slowly means that appreciable truncation of the
sum will be necessary (probably at a fe-value equal to a multiple of 27r/w 0 ), but the resultant operation will still be a considerable improvement over (27). The gain function of a truncated smoothing operator is illustrated as the dashed curve (3) in Figure 1. As was first pointed out by Slutsky (1927), injudicious smoothing procedures can actually have the effect of introducing periodicities — just because the gain function of the averaging operation has a peak at a frequency where it should not. One should always be quite clear about the effect of one's "smoothing" operations, and the way to do this is to graph the corresponding gain factor as a function of frequency. Attempts are sometimes made to "eliminate" trend in a series by the method of variate difference — that is, by calculating series such as
y' t X
This measure can have a rough success, in that it largely eliminates deviations from stationarity, although a more fundamental approach would be to fit a model which would actually generate the observed nonstationarity, such as an unstable autoregression. In any case, in evaluating the series obtained after differencing, one must remember
TIME SERIES: Advanced Problems that the application of a p-fold difference, Ap, has the effect of multiplying the spectral density function of a stationary series by (2sin-|co)2p. Sample analogues Consider now the problem of inference from a sample of nconsecutive observations, x1,x2, • • • ,xn. Autocovariance function. Define the uncorrected lagged product-sum,
(31) t=3+l
If E(%0 =0, then
(32)
C; =
n —s
certainly provides an unbiased estimate of Fs and, under wide conditions, also a consistent one. However, in general the mean will be nonzero and unknown. The sample autocovariance is in such cases naturally measured by
(33)
n —s
n —s
_ *=«+!
and EJC is estimated by
(34)
65
If the series has already been corrected for the mean (so that one works with xt — x rather than Xt'), then (36) will become (37)
f B (o>) =
/ J
C«cos (cos).
n
Whether one uses formula (36) or formula (37) is not of great consequence. A constant nonzero mean can be regarded as a harmonic component of zero frequency, so the two functions (36) and (37) will differ only near the origin. The sampling variability of f n (co) does not decrease with increasing n, and f n (co) is not a consistent estimator of c/>(co). The problem of finding a consistent estimator will be discussed below. Fitting and testing autoregressive models The autoregressive model (8) is a useful trial model, since it usually explains much of the variation and often has some physical foundation. Furthermore, its test theory is typical of a much more general case. The first problem is that of the actual fitting, the estimation of the parameters ak and cr2; the second problem is that of testing the fit of the model. If the et and xt have means 0 and /JL, respectively, then the model (8) must be modified slightly to
*=(38)
ak(Xt
— yU,) = €t .
Minor modifications of (33) will be found in the literature. Expression (33) will in general provide a biased but consistent estimate of Fs with a sampling variance of the order of (n — s)-1. For a given n the variability of Cs thus increases with s; fortunately, the earlier autocovariances generally contain most of the information. In order to eliminate problems of scale, investigators sometimes work with the autocorrelation coefficient
One usually assumes the et normally distributed— not such a restrictive assumption as it appears. To a first approximation the means and variances of autocorrelations are unaffected by nonnormality (see Whittle 1954, p. 210), and estimates of parameters such as the autoregressive coefficients, a fc , should be similarly robust. For normal processes the log-likelihood of the sample X-L, x2, • • • , xn is, for large n,
f\OO Q c r J\
(39)
n /n rI g — — v_;g/v_y0
rather than with C s , but this is not essential. Spectral density function. The sample analogue of spectral density function (the periodogram, formula (21) ) was introduced before the spectral density function itself. Note from (21) that one can write
n
L = const. — -^logcr2 —
Maximizing this expression with respect to obtains the estimator
EE (40)
*
7;
one
1
—
n / J
cos (cos) (36)
n
The second approximate equality follows if one neglects the difference between the various averages (1/n) Zli^-fc (fe = 0, 1, 2, • • • , p), that is, if,
66
TIME SERIES: Advanced Problems
as is often done, an end effect is neglected. Thus, the maximum likelihood estimator of JJL is approximately the usual sample arithmetic mean, despite the dependence between observations. Inserting this estimator in (39), one finds
(41) n I 1 L =s const. —-=r\ log cr2 H 5-
cr- / •* / A
2 \
so that the maximum likelihood estimators of the remaining parameters are determined approximately by the relations
as a x2 variable with q df. In both cases large values of the test statistic are critical. Fitting and testing more general models The approximate expression (41) for the loglikelihood (maximized with respect to the mean) can be generalized to any process for which the reciprocal of the spectral density function can be expanded in a Fourier series, CO
(47)
(ft(o))^ 1 = cr~2 E y* exp (iws). 8=-<x>
The generalized expression is
(42)
= 0,
j = 1, 2, • • • , p,
(48) (43)
= iv n Note the analogue between (42) and (43) and the Yule-Walker relations (18). To test prescribed values of the ak one can use the fact that the estimators dk are asymptotically normally distributed with means ak (respectively) and a covariance matrix
( Here [ajk] denotes a p x p matrix with typical element ajK, j , k — 1, 2, • • • , p.) This result holds if the et are independently and identically distributed, with a finite fourth moment. (See Whittle 1954, p. 214.) However, a more satisfactory and more versatile approach to the testing problem is provided by use of the Wilks X-ratio. This will be described in a more general setting below; for the present, note the following uses. To test whether a given set of coefficients a l 9 a2 , • • • , ap are zero, treat
as a x2 variable with p degrees of freedom (cZf). Here erf, has been used to denote the estimator (43), emphasizing the order p assumed for the autoregression. To test whether an autoregression of order p gives essentially as good a fit as one of order p + q, treat (46)
= (n — p — g)log
2 rp+q
OA—~m s=-oo
(49)
dco.
+
4?r
In general it will be easier to calculate the sum over autocovariances in (48) than to calculate the integral over the periodogram in (49), but sometimes the second approach is taken. If the model depends on a number of parameters, O-L, 02, • • • , Op (of which cr2 will usually be one), then 0(w) will also depend on these, and the maximum likelihood estimators, # ; , are obtained approximately by maximizing either of the expressions (48) and (49). The covariance matrix of the estimators is given asymptotically by
(50) [cov
= (n - p) log
\ \
where cr2 is the "prediction variance," the conditional variance of xt given the values of xt-i, xt-.,, • • • . (See Whittle 1954.) The sum in (48) cannot really be taken as infinite; in most practical cases the coefficients ys converge reasonably fast to zero as s increases, and the sum can be truncated. Another way of writing (48) is
L ==; const. —
(44)
(45)
4-J
, _ J_
n
I
n/
L ~ const. --=- log0-2 + —
dlog< 277-
d6k
dO
(See Whittle 1954.) Thus, for the moving-average process (51)
xt = et - Pet-i ,
with |/3 < 1, one finds that -i 1 (52) E
/3|S|CS
The maximum likelihood estimator of (3 is obtained by minimizing (52), and expression (52) with /3
TIME SERIES: Advanced Problems substituted for ft provides the maximum likelihood estimator of a2 = var(e). One finds from (50) that the two estimators are asymptotically uncorrelated, with 4 var(
(53)
n
Practical techniques for the calculation of the maximum likelihood estimators in more general cases have been worked out by Durbin (1959) and Walker (1962). Tests of fit can be based upon the X-ratio criterion. Let cr2 denote the maximum likelihood estimator of o-2 when parameters 0i, 0 2 , • • • , 9,, (one of these being cr2 itself) are fitted and the values of parameters 9p+l, 9p+2, • • • , 0P+q are prescribed. Thus, cr2+(j will be the maximum likelihood estimator of
i//2=(rc-p-
og
cr
as a x2 variable with g df. Multivariate processes In few realistic analyses is one concerned with a single variable; in general, one has several, so that xt must be considered a vector of m jointly stationary variables, (xlt, x2t, • • • , xmt). There is a generalization (Whittle 1954) of expression (49) for the log-likelihood in such cases, but the only case considered here is that of a multivariate autoregression, (55)
E ak(xt-k — u) = £«,
where the nk are m x m matrices with n0 = ', and £ ( £ « ) = 0, (56)
s = t, s ^ t.
This last assumption states that the vector residuals are mutually uncorrelated but that the covariance matrix of a single vector residual is V. As before, the maximum likelihood estimator of the mean vector, u., is approximately x, and with this inserted the following generalization of (41) results: (57)
^ n ~ l^/l i V V trtv ^««'V-l** f1 M L = const. — -^-[log |V| +2-, 2-« \nj* ak^j^)i'
Here Cs is the m x m matrix whose (jk)ih element is the sample covariance of xjt and xkit_s, that is, the (jfe)th element of C, is
67
(58)
(r .Yv V I
/ ^ Jv j $
\t=S + l
II
/^J
/ \ t=1
^Itt
\
)
n —s n —s and tr A denotes the sum of the diagonal elements of a matrix A. The maximum likelihood estimators are given by (59)
E fc=0
(60) For the important case p = 1, which can be written (61)
Xt = OLXt-i + £t,
these become (62) (63)
« = C1CS1, f — •-' f V— — '-'
Estimator (62) will, of course, be modified if certain elements of a are known and need not be estimated. Tests of fit can be based on the X-ratio criterion as before, with expression (57) used for the log-likelihood. In econometric work, models of type (61) are particularly important. One minor complication is that exogenous variables may also occur in the right-hand side (see (73), below); exogenous variables are variables which are regarded as external to the system and which need not be explained—for example, in a model of a national economy, variables such as overseas prices and technical progress might be regarded as exogenous. A much more severe complication is that of simultaneity: that xt may be represented as a regression upon some of its own elements as well as upon xt-i and exogenous variables. This latter difficulty has led to an extensive literature, which will not be discussed here (for a general reference, see Johnston 1963). Regression. An important special type of multivariate process is the regression (64)
Xt = E
+
where xt (now assumed to be scalar) is regarded as linearly dependent upon a number of variables, ujt, with a stationary residual, 7]t (in general autocorrelated). The processes [ujt] may be other stationary processes, even lagged versions of the {xt} process itself, or deterministic sequences such as t" or sin (cut). Simple and unbiased estimators of the /3j are the least square estimators, b j , obtained by minimizing £"=1i?2 and determined by the linear equations
68
TIME SERIES: Advanced Problems
(65)
E bk(ujt, M fct ) = (xt, Ujt},
7=1,2, ---.r,
where the notation (66)
(xt,yt) = E xtyt
has been used for the simple product-sum. The covariance matrix of these estimators is (67) r n n
vb = [(ujt, MM)]-1 EE*
fc=0
where [ajk] indicates an r x r matrix with typical element ajk and Ts the autocovariance function of {r)t}. If the processes {ujt} are jointly stationary, then one can write
n
(68)
exp
and (67) can be rewritten
(69)
n
where M(co) = [M;/,(w)], M = M(TT) - M(-TT), and 0(oj) is the spectral density function of {T^}. This principle can be extended even to mildly nonstationary processes, such as polynomials in t (Grenander & Rosenblatt 1957). The maximum likelihood estimators, /3;, will in general have smaller variances; these estimators are obtained by minimizing the log-likelihood, (70)
L ^ const. —
log cr2 +
They obey the equation system
(71) 7 = 1,2, - - - . r . Their covariance matrix is (72)
If the residual spectral density function, <£(eo), involves unknown parameters, then expression (70) must be maximized with respect to these as well as to the (3j. This maximization can be complicated, and a simpler way of allowing for some autocorrelation in {^t} is to fit, instead of (64), a model with some autoregression and with uncorrelated residuals, p (73) E + €, =E
27T
n
If 0(cu) has the same value at all co's for which any of the M; 7 ;(ft)) change value, then the variances of the least square estimators will be asymptotically equal to those of the maximum likelihood estimators, and, indeed, the two sets of estimators may themselves be asymptotically equal. For example, (40) above shows that the maximum likelihood estimator of a mean, /*, reduces asymptotically to the least square estimator x, a great simplification.
The p* of (73) cannot be identified with the p, of (64), but they do indicate to what extent the ujt can explain xt variation. Spectral (periodogram) analysis In fitting a parametric model one obtains an estimate of the spectral density function, Dut one often wishes to obtain a direct estimate without the assumptions implied in a model, just as one uses Cg to estimate the autocovariance function, Ts . The periodogram ordinate, f n ()-), one has also, for normal processes, (75) This variance does not tend to zero with increasing n, and f n (&>) is not a consistent estimator of <£(w). That explains the very irregular appearance of the periodogram when it is graphed and the reason one
E (3jUjt, Xf-
s
—
conceives the idea of estimating $(co) by smoothing the periodogram. What one can say concerning distributions is that the quantities (76)
I,= ' / e i - ' - x
are approximately independent standard exponential variables for 7 = 1,2, • • • , N, where N < n/2. That is, the I; have approximately a joint probability density function exp(— E^i^-)Suppose now that one attempts to estimate $(«) at w = X. by an estimator of the form
(77)
E
cos (CDS),
TIME SERIES: Advanced Problems
then for a bivariate stationary process {xt, y t } the idea of a spectral density function is replaced by that of a spectral density matrix
where K(o>) is a symmetric function of period represented by a Fourier series, (78)
K(o>)=£fe,exp(za>s). 8
(86)
From (76) it follows that -
(79)
(80)
var<5(X) ~ — / TiTT J
M
s
m
ks =
m,
si > m,
0,
(82)
'
To test whether a strong peak in the periodogram indicates the presence of a harmonic component (when a delta-function would be superimposed on the spectral density function), one can use the statistic
(83)
9=
max I,
SI,
for which (84)
p(g>u) =
J!
The sum in (84) is taken for all values of j not greater than 1/u. In constructing the I; one can use a formula of type (77) to estimate
=E
tyijx
(87)
The Fourier series K(w) will be chosen as a function with a peak at the origin; as this peak grows sharper, the bias of $(A) (determined from (79) ) decreases, but the variance (determined by (80)) increases. The best choice will be a compromise between these two considerations. The question of the optimal choice of weight function has been much studied. The choice is partly a matter of convenience, depending upon whether or not one works from the periodogram, that is, upon which of the two formulas (77) is used. If one is calculating digitally, then a simple and useful smoothing formula is Bartlett's, for which
(81)
[
Suppose one wishes to investigate the dependence of {yt} upon { x t } . As an alternative to low-lag linear models such as
K(\ -
2-7T
69
-* + et
one can apply multivariate techniques to the Fourier components of the processes, at individual values of a). Thus, $ OT/ (OJ) is the variance of the Fourier component of {yt} at frequency co; one can take a linear regression of this component onto the corresponding Fourier component of { x t } and find a "residual variance," (88)
The quantity C r , y (w) is the type of correlation coefficient known as the coherency; if it approaches unity in magnitude, then the frequency components at a) of the two series are closely related. It may well happen, for example, that low frequency components of two series keep well in step, although the short-term variation corresponding to high frequency components may be almost uncorrelated between the two series. Note that (88) is the spectral density function of the process 00
I1?*} = {yt- k E= -oo bbXt-k}, where the b's are chosen to minimize var(i7). In practice the elements of the spectral density matrix must be estimated by formulas analogous to (77). A sometimes illuminating alternative to a periodogram analysis is to decompose a series into components corresponding to different frequency bands by using a number of band-pass operators of type (29) and to examine these components individually.
P. WHITTLE [See also LINEAR HYPOTHESES, article on REGRESSION; MARKOV CHAINS.] BIBLIOGRAPHY There are no completely satisfactory texts, principally because virtually nobody has a satisfactorily broad grasp of both the theory and the application of time series analysis. A person with a mathematical background may do best
70
TIME SERIES: Cycles
to read the first four chapters of Grenander & Rosenblatt 1957 and to follow this with a study of Hannan 1960. For someone with less mathematics, chapters 29 and 30 of Kendall & Stuart 1966 provide an introduction which, although not deep, is nevertheless sound and well illustrated. Jenkins 1965 surveys some of the more recent work on spectral analysis. BARTLETT, M. S. 1963 The Spectral Analysis of Point Processes. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B 25:264-296. DURBIN, J. 1959 Efficient Estimation of Parameters in Moving-average Models. Biometrika 46:306-316. GRANGER, CLIVE W. J.; and HATANAKA, M. 1964 Spectral Analysis of Economic Time Series. Princeton Univ. Press. GRENANDER, ULF; and ROSENBLATT, MURRAY 1957 Statistical Analysis of Stationary Time Series. New York: Wiley. HANNAN, EDWARD J. (1960) 1962 Time Series Analysis. London: Methuen. INTERNATIONAL STATISTICAL INSTITUTE 1965 Bibliography on Time Series and Stochastic Processes. Edited by Herman Wold. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd. JENKINS, G. M. 1965 A Survey of Spectral Analysis. Applied Statistics 14:2-32. JOHNSTON, JOHN 1963 Econometric Methods. New York: McGraw-Hill. KENDALL, MAURICE G.; and STUART, ALAN 1966 The Advanced Theory of Statistics. Volume 3: Design and Analysis, and Time Series. New York: Hafner; London: Griffin. MACROBERT, THOMAS M. (1917) 1947 Functions of a Complex Variable. 3d ed. New York: Macmillan. SLUTSKY, EUGEN E. (1927) 1937 The Summation of Random Causes as the Source of Cyclic Processes. Econometrica 5:105-146. -> First published in Russian. Reprinted in 1960 in Slutsky's Izbrannye trudy. SYMPOSIUM ON TIME SERIES ANALYSIS, BROWN UNIVERSITY, 1962 1963 Proceedings. Edited by Murray Rosenblatt. New York: Wiley. WALKER, A. M. 1962 Large-sample Estimation of Parameters for Autoregressive Processes With Movingaverage Residuals. Biometrika 49:117-131. WHITTLE, P. 1953 The Analysis of Multiple Stationary Time Series. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B 15:125-139. WHITTLE, P. 1954 Appendix. In Herman Wold, A Study in the Analysis of Stationary Time Series. 2d ed. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. WHITTLE, P. 1963 Prediction and Regulation by Linear Least-square Methods. London: English Universities Press. WOLD, HERMAN (1938) 1954 A Study in the Analysis of Stationary Time Series. 2d ed. With an Appendix by P. Whittle. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. Ill CYCLES
Cycles, waves, pulsations, rhythmic phenomena, regularity in return, periodicity—these notions reflect a broad category of natural, human, and social phenomena where cycles are the dominating feature. The daily and yearly cycles in sunlight, temperature, and other geophysical phenomena are among the simplest and most obvious instances.
Regular periodicity provides a basis for prediction and for extracting other useful information about the observed phenomena. Nautical almanacs with their tidal forecasts are a typical example. Medical examples are pulse rate as an indicator of cardiovascular status and the electrocardiograph as a basis for analysis of the condition of the heart. The study of cyclic phenomena dates from prehistoric times, and so does the experience that the area has dangerous pitfalls. From the dawn of Chinese history comes the story that the astronomers Hi and Ho lost their heads because they failed to forecast a solar eclipse (perhaps 2137 B.C.). In 1929, after some twelve years of promising existence, the Harvard Business Barometer (or Business Index) disappeared because it failed to predict the precipitous drop in the New York stock market. Cyclic phenomena are recorded in terms of time series. A key aspect of cycles is the degree of predictability they give to the time series generated. Three basic situations should be distinguished: (a) The cycles are fixed, so that the series is predictable over the indefinite future. (b) The cycles are partly random, so that the series is predictable only over a limited future. (c) The cycles are spurious—that is, there are no real cycles—and the series is not predictable. For the purposes of this article the term "cycle" is used in a somewhat broader sense than the strict cyclic periodicity of case (a). Limited and unlimited predictability The fundamental difference between situations (a) and (b) can be illustrated by two simple cases. The scheme of "hidden periodicities." Suppose that an observed time series is generated by two components. The first is strictly periodic, with period length p, so that its value at time t + p is equal to its value at time t. The second component, superimposed upon the first, is a sequence of random (independent, identically distributed) elements. Thus, each term of the observed series can be represented as the sum of a periodic term and a random one. Tidal water is a cyclic phenomenon where this model applies quite well (see Figure 1). Here the observed series is the measured water level at Dover, the strictly periodic component represents the lunar cycle, 12 hours and 50 minutes in length (two maxima in one lunar day), and the random elements are the irregular deviations caused by storms, random variations in air pressure, earthquakes, etc. The periodic component provides a prediction—
TIME SERIES: Cycles
71
Predicted by model Observed
figure 1 — Level of tidal water at Dover, 6 daysi * Hypothetical data.
an unbiased predicted value for a future time with expectation equal to that future value of the periodic component, and with prediction error equal to the random element. The difficulty is that the periodic component is not known and must be estimated empirically. A simple and obvious method is that of Buys Ballot's table; each point on the periodic component is estimated by the average of several points on the observed series, separated in time by the length of the period, p, where p either is known or is assessed by trial and error. The larger is the residual as compared to the cyclic component, the longer is the series needed to estimate with confidence the cyclic component. The approach of hidden periodicities may be extended, with two or more periodic components being considered. Tidal water again provides a typical illustration. In addition to the dominating lunar component, a closer fit to the data is obtained by considering a solar component with period 183 days. In view of its simplicity and its many important applications, it is only natural that the approach involving strictly periodic components is of long standing. A distinction must be made, however, between formal representation of a series (which is always possible), on the one hand, and prediction, on the other. Under general conditions, any series, even a completely random one, can be represented by a sum of periodic components plus a
residual, and if the number of periodic components is increased indefinitely, the residual can be made as small as desired. In particular, if each of the periodic components is a sine or a cosine curve (a sinusoid), then the representation of the observed series is called a spectral representation. Such a representation, it is well to note, may be of only limited use for prediction outside the observed range, because if the observed range is widened, the terms of the representation may change appreciably. In the extreme case when the observations are all stochastically independent, the spectral representation of the series is an infinite sum of sinusoids; in this case neither the spectral representation nor alternative forecasting devices provide any predictive information. Irregular cycles. Until rather recently (about 1930), the analysis of oscillatory time series was almost equivalent to the assessment of periodicities. For a long time, however, it had been clear that important phenomena existed that refused to adhere to the forecasts based on the scheme of hidden periodicities. The most obvious and challenging of these was the sequence of some twenty business cycles, each of duration five to ten years, between 1800 and 1914. Phenomena with irregular cycles require radically different methods of analysis. The scheme of "disturbed periodicity." The breakthrough in the area of limited predictability came with Yule's model (1927) for the irregular
72
TIME SERIES: Cycles
Disturbances plotted as de from the observed series
Figure 2 — Sunspof intensity Source: Adapted from Yule 1927.
11-year cycle of sunspot intensity (see Figure 2). Yule interpreted the sunspot cycle as similar to the movement of a damped pendulum that is kept in motion by an unending stream of random shocks. [See the biography of YULE.] The sharp contrast between the scheme of hidden periodicities and the scheme of disturbed periodicity can now be seen. In the hidden periodicities model the random elements are superimposed upon the cyclic component(s) without affecting or disturbing their strict periodicity. In Yule's model the
series may be regarded as generated by the random elements, and there is no room for strict periodicity. (Of course, the two types can be combined, as will be seen.) The deep difference between the two types of model is reflected in their forecasting properties (see Figure 3). The time scales for the two forecasts have here been adjusted so as to give the same period. In the hidden-periodicities model the forecast over the future time span has the form of an undamped sinusoid, thus permitting an effec-
Disturbed periodicity model Hidden periodicity model
Figure 3 — Forecasting the future on the basis of the past
TIME SERIES: Cycles tive forecast over indefinitely long spans when the model is correct. In Yule's model the forecast is a damped sinusoid, which provides effective information over limited spans, but beyond that it gives only the trivial forecast that the value of the series is expected to equal the unconditional over-all mean of the series. Generalizations. The distinction between limited and unlimited predictability of an observed times series goes to the core of the probability structure of the series. In the modern development of time series analysis on the basis of the theory of stochastic processes, the notions of predictability are brought to full significance. It can be shown that the series yt under very general conditions allows a unique representation, (1)
yt
known as predictive decomposition, where (a) the two components are uncorrelated, (Z?) <&t is deterministic and ^t is nondeterministic, and (c) the nondeterministic component allows a representation of the Yule type. In Yule's model no O« component is present. In the hidden-periodicities model <£>i is a sum of sinusoids, while tyt is the random residual. Generally, however, <$>t, although deterministic in the prediction sense, is random. The statistical treatment of mixed models like (1) involves a variety of important and challenging problems. Speaking broadly, the valid assessment of the structure requires observations that extend over a substantial number of cycles, and even then the task is difficult. A basic problem is to test for and estimate a periodic component on the supplementary hypothesis that the ensuing
20.0
73
residual allows a nondeterministic representation, or, more generally, to perform a simultaneous estimation of the two components. A general method for dealing with these problems has been provided by Whittle (1954); for a related approach, see Allais (1962). Other problems with a background in this decomposition occur in the analysis of seasonal variation [see TIME SERIES, article on SEASONAL ADJUSTMENT]. Other stochastic models. Since a tendency to cyclic variation is a conspicuous feature of many phenomena, stochastic models for their analysis have used a variety of mechanisms for generating apparent or genuine cyclicity. Brief reference will be made to the dynamic models for (a) predatorprey populations and (£>) epidemic diseases. In both cases the pioneering approaches were deterministic, the models having the form of differential equation systems. The stochastic models developed at a later stage are more general, and they cover features of irregularity that cannot be explained by deterministic methods. What is of special interest in the present context is that the cycles produced in the simplest deterministic models are strictly periodic, whereas the stochastic models produce irregular cycles that allow prediction only over a limited future. Figure 4 refers to a stochastic model given by M. S. Bartlett (1957) for the dynamic balance between the populations of a predator—for example, the lynx—and its prey—for example, the hare. The data of the graph are artificial, being constructed from the model by a Monte Carlo experiment. The classic models of A. J. Lotka and V. Volterra are deterministic, and the ensuing cycles take the form
24.0
Figure 4 — Predator-prey populations according to a stochastic model Source: Bartlett 1957, p. 37.
74
TIME SERIES: Cycles
NUMBER OF CASES
4,000
1910
Figure 5 — Paralytic cases of poliomyelitis, Sweden 1905—1962 Source: Unpublished data.
of sinusoids. The cyclic tendency is quite pronounced in Figure 4, but at the same time the development is affected by random features. After three peaks in both populations, the prey remains at a rather low level that turns out to be critical for the predator, and the predator population dies out. The peaks in Figure 5 mark the severe spells of poliomyelitis in Sweden from 1905 onward. The cyclic tendency is explained, on the one hand, by the contagious nature of the disease and, on the other, by the fact that slight infections provide immunity, so that after a nationwide epidemic it takes some time before a new group of susceptibles emerges. The foundations for a mathematical theory of the dynamics of epidemic diseases were laid by Kermack and McKendrick (1927), who used a deterministic approach in terms of differential equations. Their famous threshold theorem states that only if the infection rate, p, is above a certain critical value, p 0 , will the disease flare up in epidemics. Bartlett (1957) and others have developed the theory in terms of stochastic models; a stochastic counterpart to the threshold theorem has been provided by Whittle (1955). Bartlett's predator-prey model provides an example of how a cyclic deterministic model may become evolutive (nonstationary) when stochasticized, while Whittle's epidemic model shows how
an evolutive deterministic model may become stationary. Both of the stochastic models are completely nondeterministic; note that the predictive decomposition (1) extends to nonstationary processes. The above examples have been selected so as to emphasize that there is no sharp demarcation between cycles with limited predictability and the spurious periodicity of phenomena ruled by randomness, where by pure chance the variation may take wavelike forms, but which provides no basis even for limited predictions. Thus, if a recurrent phenomenon has a low rate of incidence, say A per year, and the incidences are mutually independent (perhaps a rare epidemic disease that has no aftereffect of immunity), the record of observations might evoke the idea that the recurrences have some degree of periodicity. It is true that in such cases there is an average period of length 1/X between the recurrences, but the distance from one recurrence to the next is a random variable that cannot be forecast, since it is independent of past observations. A related situation occurs in the summation of mutually independent variables. Figure 6 shows a case in point as observed in a Monte Carlo experiment with summation of independent variables (Wold 1965). The similarity between the three waves, each representing the consecutive additions
TIME SERIES: Cycles
75
—1,500 -
-2,000 1800
1850
1900
Figure 6 — Spurious cycles and Kondratieff waves Sources: Consecutive sums, Wold 1965, p. 25; wholesale prices, Piatier 1961.
of some 100,000 variables, is rather striking. Is it really due to pure chance? Or is the computer simulation of the "randomness" marred by some slip that has opened the door to a cyclic tendency in the ensuing sums? (For an amusing discussion of related cases, see Cole's "Biological Clock in the Unicorn" 1957.) Figure 6 also gives, in the series of wholesale prices in Great Britain, an example of "Kondratieff waves"—the much discussed interpretation of economic phenomena as moving slowly up and down in spells of some fifty years. Do the waves embody genuine tendencies to long cycles, or are they of a spurious nature? The question is easy to pose but difficult or impossible to answer on the basis of available data. The argument that the "Kondratieff waves" are to a large extent parallel in the main industrialized countries carries little weight, in view of international economic connections. The two graphs have been combined in Figure 6 in order to emphasize that with regard to waves of long duration it is always difficult to sift the wheat of genuine cycles from the chaff of spurious periodicity. [See the biography of KONDRATIEFF.] Genuine versus spurious cycles Hypothesis testing. Cycles are a specific feature in many scientific models, and their statistical assessment usually includes (a) parameter estimation for purposes of quantitative specification of the model, and (£>) hypothesis testing for purposes of establishing the validity of the model and thereby of the cycles. In modern statistics it is often (sometimes tacitly) specified that any method under (a) should be supplemented by an appropriate device under (b). Now, this principle is easy to state, but
it is sometimes difficult to fulfill, particularly with regard to cycles and related problems of time series analysis. The argument behind this view may be summed up as follows, although not everyone would take the same position: (i) Most of the available methods for hypothesis testing are designed for use in controlled experiments—the supreme tool of scientific model building—whereas the assessment of cycles typically refers to nonexperimental situations. (ii) The standard methods for both estimation and hypothesis testing are based on the assumption of independent replications. Independence is on the whole a realistic and appropriate assumption in experimental situations, but usually not for nonexperimental data. (iii) Problems of point estimation often require less stringent assumptions than those of interval estimation and hypothesis testing. This is frequently overlooked by the methods designed for experimental applications, because the assumption of independence is usually introduced jointly for point estimation, where it is not always needed, and for hypothesis testing, where it is always consequential. (if) It is therefore a frequent situation in the analysis of nonexperimental data that adequate methods are available for estimation, but further assumptions must be introduced to conduct tests of hypotheses. It is even a question whether such tests can be performed at all in a manner corresponding to the standard methods in experimental analysis, because of the danger of specification errors that mar the analysis of nonexperimental data. (f) Standard methods of hypothesis testing in
76
TIME SERIES: Cycles
controlled experiments are thus of limited scope in nonexperimental situations. Here other approaches come to the fore. It will be sufficient to mention predictive testing—the model at issue is taken as a basis for forecasts, and in due course the forecasts are compared with the actual developments. Reporting of nonexperimental models should always include a predictive test. The following example is on the cranky side, but it does illustrate that the builder of a nonexperimental model should have le courage de son modele to report a predictive test, albeit in this case the quality of the model does not come up to the model builder's courage. The paper (Lewin 1958) refers to two remarkable events—the first permanent American settlement at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607 and the Declaration of Independence in 1776 —and takes the 169 years in between as the basic "cycle." After another 84y2 years (% of the basic cycle) there is the remarkable event of the Civil War, in 1861; after 56 more years (y3 of the cycle) there is the beginning of the era of world wars in 1917; after 28 more years (y6 of the cycle) there is the atomic era with the first bomb exploded in 1945. The paper, published in 1958, ends with the following predictive statement: "The above relation to the basic 169 year cycle of yl5 y2, y3, % is a definite decreasing arithmetic progression where the sum of all previous denominators becomes the denominator of the next fraction. To continue this pattern and project, we have the 6th cycle—1959, next U.S. Epochal Event—14 year lapse—y12 of 169 years" (Lewin 1958, pp. 11-12). The 1959 event should have been some major catastrophe like an atomic war, if I have correctly understood what the author intimates between the lines in the first part of his article. It is well to note that this paper, singled out here as an example, is far from unique. Cycles have an intrinsic fascination for the human mind. A cursory scanning of the literature, particularly Cycles, the journal of the Foundation for the Study of Cycles, will suffice to show that in addition to the strictly scientific contributions, there is a colorful subvegetation where in quality and motivation the papers and books display all shades of quasiscientific and pseudoscientific method, down to number mysticism and other forms of dilettantism and crankiness, and where the search for truth is sometimes superseded by drives of self-realization and self-suggestion, not to speak of unscrupulous money-making. The crucial distinction here is not between professional scientists and amateurs. It is all to the good if the search for truth is strengthened by many modes of motivation. The sole valid
criterion is given by the general standards of scientific method. Professionals are not immune to selfsuggestion and other human weaknesses, and the devoted work of amateurs guided by an uncompromising search for truth is as valuable here as in any other scientific area. Further remarks Cycles are of key relevance in the theory and application of time series analysis; their difficulty is clear from the fact that it is only recently that scientific tools appropriate for dealing with cycles and their problems have been developed. The fundamental distinction between the hidden-periodicity model, with its strict periodicity and unlimited predictability, and Yule's model, with its disturbed periodicity and limited predictability, could be brought to full significance only after 1933, by the powerful methods of the modern theory of stochastic processes. On the applied side, the difficulty of the problems has been revealed in significant shifts in the very way of viewing and posing the problems. Thus, up to the failure of the Harvard Business Barometer the analysis of business cycles was essentially a unirelational approach, the cycle being interpreted as generated by a leading series by way of a system of lagged relationships with other series. The pioneering works of Jan Tinbergen in the late 1930s broke away from the unirelational approach. The models of Tinbergen and his followers are multirelational, the business cycles being seen as the resultant of a complex system of economic relationships. [See BUSINESS CYCLES; DISTRIBUTED LAGS.] The term "cycle," when used without further specification, primarily refers to periodicities in time series, and that is how the term is taken in this article. The notion of "life cycle" as the path from birth to death of living organisms is outside the scope of this presentation. So are the historical theories of Spengler and Toynbee that make a grandiose combination of time series and life cycle concepts, seeing human history as a succession of cultures that are born, flourish, and die. Even the shortest treatment of these broad issues would carry us far beyond the realm of time series analysis; this omission, however, must not be construed as a criticism. [For a discussion of these issues, see PERIODIZATION.] Cycles vs. innovations. The history of human knowledge suggests that belief in cycles has been a stumbling block in the evolution of science. The philosophy of the cosmic cycle was part of Stoic and Epicurean philosophy: every occurrence is a recurrence; history repeats itself in cycles, cosmic
TIME SERIES: Cycles cycles; all things, persons, and phenomena return exactly as before in cycle after cycle. What is it in this strange theory that is of such appeal that it should have been incorporated into the foundations of leading philosophical schools and should occur in less extreme forms again and again in philosophical thinking through the centuries, at least up to Herbert Spencer, although it later lost its vogue? Part of the answer seems to be that philosophy has had difficulties with the notion of innovation, having, as it were, a horror innovationum. If our philosophy leaves no room for innovations, we must conclude that every occurrence is a recurrence, and from there it is psychologically a short step to the cosmic cycle. This argument being a blind alley, the way out has led to the notions of innovation and limited predictability and to other key concepts in modern theories of cyclic phenomena. Thus, in Yule's model (Figure 2) the random shocks are innovations that reduce the regularity of the sunspot cycles so as to make them predictable only over a limited future. More generally, in the predictive decomposition (1) the nondeterministic component is generated by random elements, innovations, and the component is therefore only of limited predictability. Here there is a close affinity to certain aspects of the general theory of knowledge. We note that prediction always has its cognitive basis in regularities observed in the past, cyclic or not, and that innovations set a ceiling to prediction by scientific methods. [See TIME SERIES, article on ADVANCED PROBLEMS.]
77
— X cos (tit + fji sin cot,
(4) while
(5) is a sequence of random variables, independent of one another and of xt, and identically distributed with zero mean, E(e) = 0, and standard deviation o-(e). For any X and ft the sinusoid (4) is periodic, xt+p — xt, with period p = 2-Tr/co, and satisfies the difference equation (6)
— *2,pXt-i + Xt-z — 0,
where p = cos co. The sinusoid xt makes a forecast of yt+if over any prediction span k (of course, for real prediction the values of X, //., and p must be known or assumed), (7)
fe = 1, 2,
pred yt+k = xt+k ,
giving the prediction error A(t, fe) = yt+k
= €t+1c.
Hence the forecast (7) is unbiased and has the same mean-square deviation for all t and k,
(8a)
E(A) = 0,
Further light can be cast on the rationale of the forecast (7) by considering the coefficients X, p as limiting regression coefficients of yt on cos tot and sin cot :
X = lim — > yy t cos cot; T
Mathematical analysis The verbal exposition will now, in all brevity, be linked up with the theory of stochastic processes. The focus will be on (a) the comparison between the schemes of "hidden periodicities" and "disturbed harmonics" and (b) spectral representation versus predictive decomposition. Write the observed series
(2)
'~,yt-i,yt,yt*, • • - ,
taking the observations as deviations from the mean and letting the distance between two consecutive observations serve as time unit. Unless otherwise specified, the series (2) is assumed to be of finite length, ranging from t = 1 to t = n. Hidden periodicities. With reference to Figure 1, consider first the case of one hidden periodicity. The observed series yt is assumed to be generated by the model (3)
yt -xt
= 0,±l, ±2,
Where xt, the "hidden periodicity," is a sinusoid,
n^
n £-j
jj, — lim — N yt sin cot. n->oo fl
<
Disturbed periodicity. trated in Figure 2 is (9)
A
Yule's model as illus-
0 < y < 1,
yt -
where the notation makes for easy comparison with model (3): (a) In (3) the disturbances, et, are superimposed on the periodic component, xt, while yt in (9) is entirely generated by current and past disturbances, (10a)
yt = €t + a^t-i + a2€t-2 + • ' • ,
where «i = 2p (a0 — 1) and (lOfo)
ak = 2pak-i - y 2 a fc _ 2 ,
k = 2, 3, • • • .
Hence in (3) the correlation coefficient (11)
r(e t + f c , ? / 0 = 0
78
TIME SERIES: Cycles
Model (9)
Figure 7 — The standard deviation, a(A), of the prediction error as a function of the range, k, spanned by the forecast
for all k •£ 0 and t, while (9) gives (11) for all k > 0 and t. (b) (See Figure 3.) If the future disturbances, et+jc, were absent, yt+k in (3) would reduce to xt+k and thus make an undamped sinusoid (4), while yt+k in (9), say, y*t+k, would satisfy the difference equation
(12)
=o with initial values y* = yt,y]_^ = yt_lt giving ( 13a)
(13b)
z/;+fc = ak€t + a^e^ + ••• , fe)
k)].
Hence, y*t+k would make a damped sinusoid with damping factor 7, frequency to given by cos o> = p/y, and period 2?r/aj, and where the two initial values yt, yt-i determine the parameters X*, ft*. Since the difference equations in (lOfo) and (12) are the same except for the initial values, the form (13fo) of a damped sinusoid extends to ak, except that X*, /x* will be different. (c) In (3) the undamped sinusoid, xt, provides a forecast of yt+k that is unbiased in the sense of (8a). In (9) the damped sinusoid, y*t+k, provides a forecast of yt+k,
(14) where
(d) Figure 7 illustrates that in model (3) the prediction error has constant mean square deviation for all spans k. In (9) it has mean square deviation (16)
and thus is increasing with k. Formulas (8Z?) and (16) show that in (3) the disturbances, et, do not interfere with the sinusoid component, xt, while in (9) they build up the entire process, yt. (e) The fundamental difference between models (3) and (9) is further reflected in the correlogram of yt,
In (3) the correlogram is an undamped sinusoid (4), in (9) a damped sinusoid (13b). Hence, the two correlograms are curves of the same types as those shown in Figure 3. The graph actually shows the two correlograms, not any two forecasts. Generalizations. The scheme (3) extends to several hidden periodicities,
(17)
v — — Z-i V •it
cos co;t +
sin coj
giving the same prediction formulas (7)-(8). Yule's model (9) extends to the general scheme of autor egression,
(18)
showing that the forecast (14) is unbiased in the sense of the conditional expectation of yt+i< as conditioned by the current and past observations
[E(A 2 )]* = (1 + a\ + •• • + al Jo^e)
yt
giving expansions of type (10a) and (13a) and a prediction like (15a). Note that formula (17) is a composite undamped swinging. The difference equations (6) and (12) extend from order 2 to order 2h. The extension of (13b) gives y*uk as a composite damped swinging.
TIME SERIES: Cycles Stationary stochastic processes. The above models are fundamental cases of stationary stochastic processes. The observed series (2) is seen as a realization of the process. Station arity means that for any fixed n the random variables r]t+i , • • • , i?*+n that generate the observed values yt+i , • • • , yt+n have a joint probability distribution that is independent of t. In this interpretation a realization corresponds to a sampling point in an ?z-dimensional distribution, and the parameters X, JJL in model (3) are random variables that vary from one realization (2) of the process to another. Two general representation theorems for stationary stochastic processes will be quoted briefly. Spectral representation. The basic reference for spectral representation is Cramer (1940). Any real-valued stationary process 7jt allows the representation (19)
2 r =— /
where X ( « ) , / A ( W ) are real processes with zero means and zero intercorrelations, with increments dX(w), dft(w) which have zero means and zero intercorrelations, and with variances
where V(w) is the cumulative spectrum of the process. Conversely, X(«) and /*(w) can be represented in terms of 771 , Sin
tot
and correspondingly for ^t(w). (Here l.i.m. signifies limit in the mean; l.i.m. may exist even if the ordinary limit does not.) Applying the representation (19) to model (17), the spectrum V(«) has discontinuities at the points &> = a>i , while the component et corresponds to the continuous part of the spectrum. As applied to models (9) and (18), the representation (19) gives a spectrum V(w) that is everywhere continuous. Broadly speaking, the spectral representation (19) is useful for analyzing the cyclical properties of the series (2) inside the range of observations, while it is of operative use for prediction outside the observation range only in the case when V(w) presents one or more discontinuities. Predictive decomposition. The basic reference for predictive decomposition is Wold (1938). Any stationary process 771 with finite variance allows the
79
decomposition (1). The deterministic component, Oi, can be linearly predicted to any prescribed accuracy over any given span k on the basis of the past observations yt-i, yt-2, '' • • The nondeterministic component, ^, allows a representation of type (10a) with ]C«f < °°, correlation properties in accordance with (11) for all k > 0 and t, and hence a prediction of type (13a). The ensuing prediction for rjt+k, pred r)t+k = ®t+k + pred yt+*, has least square properties in accordance with (16), and if all joint probability distributions are normal (or have linear regressions), the prediction will be unbiased in the sense of (15b ). In models (3) and (17), xt is the deterministic component and et the nondeterministic component. Models (9) and (18) are completely nondeterministic. Levels D, M, N in Figure 7 refer to models that are completely deterministic, mixed, and completely nondeterministic, respectively, each level indicating the standard deviation of the prediction error for indefinitely large spans k. Making use of the analytical methods of spectral analysis, Kolmogorov (1941) and Wiener (1942) have developed the theory of the decomposition (1) and the nondeterministic expansion (10). This article aims at a brief orientation to the portrayal of cycles as a broad topic in transition. Up to the 1930s the cyclical aspects of time series were dealt with by a variety of approaches, in which nonscientific and prescientific views were interspersed with the sound methods of some few forerunners and pioneers. The mathematical foundations of probability theory as laid by Kolmogorov in 1933 gave rise to forceful developments in time series analysis and stochastic processes, bringing the problems about cycles within the reach of rigorous treatment. In the course of the transition, interest in cycles has been superseded by other aspects of time series analysis, notably prediction and hypothesis testing. For that reason, and also because cyclical features appear in time series of very different probability structures, it is only natural that cycles have not (or not as yet) been taken as a subject for a monograph. HERMAN WOLD [See also BUSINESS CYCLES and PREDICTION AND FORECASTING, ECONOMIC.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
ALLAIS, MAURICE 1962 Test de periodicite: Generalisation du test de Schuster au cas de series temporelles autocorrelees dans Fhypothese d'un processus de per-
80
TIME SERIES: Seasonal Adjustment
turbations aleatoires d'un systeme stable. Institut International de Statistique, Bulletin 39, no. 2:143193. BARTLETT, M. S. 1957 On Theoretical Models for Competitive and Predatory Biological Systems. Biometrika 44:27-42. BURKHARDT, H. 1904 Trigonometrische Interpolation: Mathematische Behandlung periodischer Naturerscheinungen mit Einschluss ihrer Anwendungen. Volume 2, pages 643-693 in Enzyklopddie der mathematischen Wissenschaften. Leipzig: Teubner. -> The encyclopedia was also published in French. BUYS BALLOT, CHRISTOPHER H. D. 1847 Les changemens periodiques de temperature dependants de la nature du soleil et de la lune mis en rapport avec le prognostic du temps deduits d'observations Neerlandaises de 1729 a 1846. Utrecht (Netherlands): Kemink. COLE, LAMONT C. 1957 Biological Clock in the Unicorn. Science 125:874-876. CRAMER, HARALD 1940 On the Theory of Stationary Random Processes. Annals of Mathematics 2d Series 41:215-230. Cycles. -» Published since 1950 by the Foundation for the Study of Cycles. See especially Volume 15. KERMACK, W. O.; and MCKENDRICK, A. G. 1927 A Contribution to the Mathematical Theory of Epidemics. Royal Society of London, Proceedings Series A 113: 700-721. KERMACK, W. O.; and MCKENDRICK, A. G. 1932 Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Epidemics. Part 2: The Problem of Endemicity. Royal Society of London, Proceedings Series A 138:55-83. KERMACK, W. O.; and MCKENDRICK, A. G. 1933 Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Epidemics. Part 3: Further Studies of the Problem of Endemicity. Royal Society of London, Proceedings Series A 141: 94-122. KEYSER, CASSIUS J. (1922) 1956 The Group Concept. Volume 3, pages 1538-1557 in James R. Newman, The World of Mathematics: A Small Library of the Literature of Mathematics From A'h-Mose the Scribe to Albert Einstein. New York: Simon & Schuster. -» A paperback edition was published in 1962. KOLMOGOROV, A. N. (1941) 1953 Sucesiones estacionarias en espacios de Hilbert (Stationary Sequences in Hilbert Space). Trabajos de estadistica 4:55-73, 243-270. -> First published in Russian in Volume 2 of the Biulleten Moskovskogo Universiteta. LEWIN, EDWARD A. 1958 1959 and a Cyclical Theory of History. Cycles 9:11-12. MITCHELL, WESLEY C. 1913 Business Cycles. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press. -> Part 3 was reprinted by University of California Press in 1959 as Business Cycles and Their Causes. PIATIER, ANDRE 1961 Statistique et observation economique. Volume 2. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. SCHUMPETER, JOSEPH A. 1939 Business Cycles: A Theoretical, Historical, and Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process. 2 vols. New York and London: McGraw-Hill. -> An abridged version was published in 1964. SCHUSTER, ARTHUR 1898 On the Investigation of Hidden Periodicities With Application to a Supposed 26 Day Period of Meteorological Phenomena. Terrestrial Magnetism 3:13-41.
TINBERGEN, J. 1940 Econometric Business Cycle Research. Review of Economic Studies 7:73-90. WHITTAKER, E. T.; and ROBINSON, G. (1924) 1944 The Calculus of Observations: A Treatise on Numerical Mathematics. 4th ed. Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand. WHITTLE, P. 1954 The Simultaneous Estimation of a Time Series: Harmonic Components and Covariance Structure. Trabajos de estadistica 3:43-57. WHITTLE, P. 1955 The Outcome of a Stochastic Epidemic—A Note on Bailey's Paper. Biometrika 42: 116-122. WIENER, NORBERT (1942) 1964 Extrapolation, Interpolation and Smoothing of a Stationary Time Series, With Engineering Applications. Cambridge, Mass.: Technology Press of M.I.T. -» First published during World War n as a classified report to Section D2, National Defense Research Committee. A paperback edition was published in 1964. WOLD, HERMAN (1938) 1954 A Study in the Analysis of Stationary Time Series. 2d ed. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. WOLD, HERMAN 1965 A Graphic Introduction to Stochastic Processes. Pages 7-76 in International Statistical Institute, Bibliography on Time Series and Stochastic Processes. Edited by Herman Wold. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd. WOLD, HERMAN 1967 Time as the Realm of Forecasting. Pages 525-560 in New York Academy of Sciences, Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Time. New York: The Academy. YULE, G. UDNY 1927 On a Method of Investigating Periodicities in Disturbed Series, With Special Reference to Wolfer's Sunspot Numbers. Royal Society, Philosophical Transactions Series A 226:267-298. IV
SEASONAL ADJUSTMENT
The objective of economic time series analysis is to separate underlying systematic movements in such series from irregular fluctuations. The systematic movements in the economy—the signals— reveal seasonal patterns, cyclical movements, and long-term trends. The irregular fluctuations—the noise—are a composite of erratic real world occurrences and measurement errors. There are definite advantages in breaking down these two major factors into their respective components. Separation of the systematic components provides a better basis for studying causal factors and forecasting changes in economic activity. Separation of the irregular components provides a basis for balancing the costs of reducing statistical errors against the resultant gains in accuracy. This article is concerned with one of the systematic components, seasonal variations, especially how to measure and eliminate it from economic time series. The relationships between seasonal variations and the other components are also described, with special reference to economic time series in the United States. Characteristics of seasonal variations in different countries, regions, and industries are not discussed.
TIME SERIES: Seasonal Adjustment The seasonal factor. The seasonal factor is the composite effect of climatic and institutional factors and captures fluctuations that are repeated more or less regularly each year. For example, the aggregate income of farmers in the United States displays a definite seasonal pattern, rising steadily each year from early spring until fall, then dropping sharply. Most economic series contain significant seasonal fluctuations, but some (stock prices, for example) contain virtually none. Changing weather conditions from one season to another significantly affect activities in such industries as construction and agriculture. Movements in a series resulting from this factor are referred to as climatic variations. Differences from year to year in the intensity of weather conditions during each season introduce an irregular element in the pattern of these movements. For example, a very cold winter will have a greater effect on some industries than a winter with average temperature and precipitation. Intermingled with the effects of variations in climatic conditions are the effects of institutional factors. Thus, the scheduling of the school year from September to June influences the seasonal pattern of industries associated with education, and the designation of tax dates by federal and state authorities affects retail sales and interest rates. Holidays also help to shape the pattern of activities over 12-month periods. The effects of Christmas and Easter upon the volume of business are widespread, but most direct and largest upon retail sales. Other holidays, such as July 4, Memorial Day, and Labor Day, have a like but generally lesser effect. The number of shopping days between Thanksgiving and Christmas may have some effect upon the volume of Christmas shopping. The effects of certain of these holidays (Easter, Labor Day, and Thanksgiving Day) upon the activities of certain months is uneven, because they do not fall on the same day of the month each year; the dates upon which they fall affect the distribution of activity between two months. The movements resulting from this factor are referred to as holiday variations (and are illustrated by curve 2 of Figure 1, below). The use of the Gregorian calendar, which provides for months of different lengths and calendar composition, has a special effect upon monthly fluctuations. This effect is due mainly to differences in the character and volume of business activity on Saturdays and Sundays and the variations in the number of these days in the same month in different years. From this point of view there are more than 12 types of months; for example, there are
81
seven different types of months with 31 days, one starting with each different day of the week. The movements resulting from this factor are referred to as calendar, or trading day, variations (and are illustrated by curve 3 of Figure 1, below). Another type of variation that occurs regularly each year arises from the introduction of new models, particularly in the automobile industry. Although new models are introduced at about the same time each year, the exact date is not predetermined and is separately decided upon by the various companies in the industry. To some extent, these decisions are based upon economic conditions rather than climatic and institutional factors. The movements resulting from this factor are referred to as model year variations. This complex of factors yields an annual cycle in many economic series, a cycle that is recurrent and periodic. The pattern varies over time, partly because calendar variations are not the same from year to year, but mainly because of changes in the relative importance of firms, industries, and geographic areas. Thus, the seasonal pattern of construction in the United States has been changing as a result of the increasing importance of the south as compared with the north. The annual cycle is not divisible into shorter periods, because any period less than a year will not contain all the factors that determine the annual cycle; for example, holidays are spaced unevenly over the full 12 months, the school schedule spans most of the year, and the tax collection program has a different impact in the various quarters. Unlike business cycle fluctuations, the timing and pattern of seasonal movements in various economic processes, such as production, investment, and financial markets, are not highly correlated. The role of the seasonal factor. The pattern and amplitude of the seasonal factor are of considerable interest to economists and businessmen. Reducing the waste of resources that are left idle during seasonal low months is one of the targets of economists concerned with accelerating economic growth. Knowledge of the seasonal pattern in the sales of their products (as well as in the materials they purchase) is helpful to companies in determining the level of production that is most efficient in the light of storage facilities, insurance costs, and the risks of forced selling. It can be used to reduce overordering, overproduction, and overstocking. Some companies forecast only their annual total sales. Then, on the basis of this single forecast, they plan their production schedules, determine their inventory and price policies, and establish quotas for their salesmen. For the companies in
82
TIME SERIES: Seasonal Adjustment
this group that also experience large seasonal fluctuations, a good first approximation of the monthly pattern of sales can be obtained by prorating the estimated annual total over the months according to the pattern shown by the seasonal factors. A more refined method involves forecasting the cyclical and trend movements for each of the 12 months ahead and applying the seasonal factors to the forecasts. The seasonal factors can be of further value in making shorter-term forecasts as the year progresses. To keep the forecasts current, the original estimates of the cyclical and trend movements can be revised each month in the light of experience to date, and the seasonal factors can be applied to the revised forecasts. But the principal interest in economic time series is usually the longer-term cyclical and trend movements. The cycle consists of cumulative and reversible movements characterized by alternating periods of expansion and contraction. It lasts three to four years, on the average. The trend reflects the still longer-run movements, lasting many years. The nature of the interest in these longer-term movements can be illustrated by the situation in the spring of 1961. About a year earlier a recession had begun in the United States. Although the March and April 1961 data for most economic time series were below the levels reached in March and April 1960, they were higher than in the immediately preceding months. The question was whether the recent improvements were larger or smaller than normal seasonal changes. In forecasting the pattern in the months ahead, it was crucial to know whether the economy had entered a new cyclical phase— whether the economy had been rising or declining to the levels of March and April 1961. An accurate answer to this question was required to determine the economic programs appropriate at the time. If the underlying movements of the economy were continuing downward, anti-recession measures were in order. But if a reversal had taken place, a different policy was needed. A mistaken reading of statistical trends at such a critical juncture could be costly to the economy; one kind of error could lead to increased unemployment; the other, to eventual inflation. Cyclical movements are shown more accurately and stand out more clearly in data that are seasonally adjusted. Seasonally adjusted data not only avoid some of the biases to which the widely used same-month-year-ago comparisons are subject but also reveal cyclical changes several months earlier than such comparisons do. Seasonally adjusted series, therefore, help the economic statistician to make more accurate and more prompt diagnoses of current cyclical trends.
Figure 1, computed by the ratio-to-moving-average method (discussed below) by the Bureau of the Census computer program, illustrates various fluctuations discussed above and the resulting seasonally adjusted series. In addition, the figure shows the months for cyclical dominance (MCD) curve. This MCD measure provides an estimate of the appropriate time span over which to observe cyclical movements in a monthly series. In deriving MCD, the average (without regard to sign) percentage change in the irregular component and cyclical component are computed for one-month spans (January-February, February-March, etc.), two-month spans (January-March, February-April, etc.), up to five-month spans. Then MCD is the shortest span for which the average change (without regard to sign) in the cyclical component is larger than the average change (without regard to sign) in the irregular component. That is, it indicates the point at which fluctuations begin to be more attributable to cyclical than to irregular movements, and the MCD curve is a moving average of this many months. (This procedure is explained in full detail in Shiskin 19570.) Seasonal adjustment methods. There are many different methods of adjusting time series for seasonal variations. All are, however, based on the fundamental idea that seasonal fluctuations can be measured and separated from the trend, cyclical, and irregular fluctuations. The task is to estimate the seasonal factor and to eliminate it from the original observations by either subtraction or division, or some combination of the two. All familiar methods of seasonal adjustment, including the well-known link-relative and ratio-tomoving-average methods, follow this simple logic. The link-relative method was introduced in 1919 by Warren M. Persons (1919a; 1919b) of Harvard University. The ratio-to-moving-average method was developed in 1922 by Frederick R. Macaulay (1931) of the National Bureau of Economic Research in a study done at the request of the Federal Reserve Board. The ratio-to-moving-average method has the advantages of more precise measurement of the components and greater flexibility. In addition, it permits analysis of each of the successive stages in the seasonal adjustment process. For these reasons, it was adopted by almost all groups engaged in large-scale seasonal adjustment work, despite the fact that it is relatively laborious. The ratio-to-moving-average method. The first step in the ratio-to-moving-average method is to obtain an estimate of the trend and cyclical factors by the use of a simple moving average that combines 12 successive monthly figures, thereby eliminating the seasonal fluctuations. Such a moving
TIME SERIES: Seasonal Adjustment
83
Billions of dollars T32
- 28
- 24
5. Seasonally adjusted series
-1 14 1953
1954
1955
1956
1957
1958
1959
1960
1961
1962
1963
1964
1965
Figure I — Sysfemaf/c and irregular components of total retail sales, United States 1953—1965 Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census 1966, p. 33.
84
TIME SERIES: Seasonal Adjustment
average is known as a "trend-cycle curve" (see curve 6 of Figure 1), since it contains virtually all the trend and cycle movements and few or none of the seasonal and irregular movements in the data. Division of the raw data by the moving average yields a series of "seasonal-irregular" ratios. An estimate of the seasonal adjustment factor for a given month is then secured by averaging the seasonal-irregular ratios for that month over a number of years (see curve 4 of Figure 1). It is assumed that the irregular factor will be canceled out in the averaging process. Finally, the original observations are seasonally adjusted by dividing each monthly observation by the seasonal adjustment factor for the corresponding month (see curve 8 of Figure 1). This method yields a multiplicative seasonal adjustment; an additive adjustment can be made by an analogous procedure. At present there is no way of making a simultaneous additive and multiplicative adjustment by this method. The ratio-to-moving-average method has been programmed for electronic computers and is in widespread use throughout the world. The first seasonal adjustment computer program was developed at the U.S. Bureau of the Census in the summer of 1954. Shortly thereafter, it was used extensively for national series for the United States, Canada, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries, Japan, and other countries. It has also been utilized by many private concerns to adjust their own data. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics adopted a similar method in 1960, and other adaptations were introduced at about the same time in several other countries. These programs take advantage of the electronic computer's high-speed, low-cost computations by utilizing more powerful and refined techniques than clerical methods had used in the past. Thus, weighted moving averages are used to represent the trend-cycle factor and to measure changing seasonal patterns. As a result, the computer programs are likely to produce satisfactory results more frequently. They also produce more information about each series—for example, estimates of the trend-cycle and irregular components and of the relations between them. This information can be used for checking the adequacy of the results, for forecasting seasonal and other movements, and for studying the relations among different types of economic fluctuations. For example, for the data graphed in Figure 1 the Bureau of the Census program also gives an indication of the relative importance of the components of the retail sales series by calculating the per cent of the total variation that is contributed by these components over one-
Tcrb/e 7 — Per cenf of total variation contributed by components of total retail sales, United States, 1953-1965 COMPONENT
PER CENT OF VARIATION Monfh-to-monfh
Holiday Trading day Seasonal Irregular Trend-cycle Tofa/
Twelve-month spans
0.5
0.5 7.1 0.0 2.4 90.0
100.0
100.0
0.4
33.1 64.8 1.2
Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census 1966, p. 33.
month and longer spans. These data are shown in Table 1. The Bureau of the Census method was designed to analyze a large variety of series equally well. To this end, alternative routines to handle different kinds of series were built into the program, along with techniques for automatically selecting the most appropriate routine for each series. The completeness, versatility, and economy of this method have stimulated broad interest in economic time series analysis in recent years. This program adjusts for changes in average climatic conditions and institutional arrangements during the year. Adjustments for variations in the number of trading days are also made for some series—for example, new building permits. Further adjustments for variable holidays, such as Easter, are made for certain series, such as retail sales of apparel. Similar adjustments for Labor Day and Thanksgiving Day help bring out the underlying trends. Studies of the effects of unusual weather upon some series have also been started. It is important to note, however, that conventional methods adjust for average weather conditions, and not for the dispersion about this average. For this reason many seasonally adjusted series, such as housing starts, will tend to be low in months when the weather is unusually bad and high in months when the weather is unusually good. The variants of the ratio-to-moving-average method all give about the same results, and there is considerable evidence that this method adjusts a large proportion of historical series very well. There are, however, some series that cannot be satisfactorily adjusted in this way—for example, those with abrupt changes in seasonal patterns or with constant patterns of varying amplitudes, or those which are highly irregular. Another problem concerns the appropriate seasonal adjustment of an aggregate that can be broken down into different sets of components, each with a different seasonal pattern. However, the principal problem remaining
TIME SERIES: Seasonal Adjustment now appears to be obtaining satisfactory seasonal adjustment factors for the current year and the year ahead. These are less accurate than those for previous years, but they play a more important role in the analysis of current economic trends and prospects. Regression methods. Attempts to use regression methods to analyze time series have been intensified since electronic computers have become available. The basic principle is to represent each of the systematic components by explicit mathematical expressions, usually in the functional form of a linear model. This can be accomplished in a simple form, for example, by regressing the difference between the unadjusted series and the trend-cycle component for each month on the trend-cycle values for that month. The constant term in the regression equation is the additive part of the seasonal component, and the product of the regression coefficient and the trend-cycle value is the multiplicative part of the seasonal component. Thus, this approach has the advantage over the ratio-to-moving-average method that it is not committed to a single type of relationship (e.g., additive or multiplicative) among the seasonal, cyclical, and irregular components of the series. Another advantage is that the different types of fluctuations can be related to the forces causing them by representing these forces as appropriate variables in the mathematical expressions. Thus, in measuring the seasonal factor, direct allowance can be made, say, for the level of the series or for temperature and precipitation. In certain series, special factors could be taken into account; for example, in measuring the seasonal factor in unemployment, allowance could be made for the number of students in the labor force, or in the case of automobile sales, the level of automobile dealers' inventories could be taken into account. Finally, the mathematical expressions for the estimates of the systematic components provide the basis for deriving measures of variance and significance tests to evaluate the reliability of the estimates; this applies, for example, to estimates of the seasonally adjusted series and to the seasonal component, or to the differences in either series over time. The principal doubt about the regression approach is whether fairly simple functional forms can adequately measure the implicit economic patterns. Or, to consider the matter from another point of view, do the complex mathematical forms required to represent the systematic movements of historical series constitute a plausible theory of economic fluctuations? A related question is whether either fairly simple functional forms, which only
85
crudely measure historical patterns, or the more complex forms, which fit the past more closely, can provide the basis for accurate forecasts of future patterns. Thus far, regression methods have been applied to only a small number of series, and their powers to decompose series into the various systematic components and to forecast seasonal factors for future years have not yet been fully tested. While the ratio-to-moving-average method does not have the advantages provided by the mathematical properties of the regression method, extensive tests have demonstrated that it gives good results in practice. Tests completed at the Bureau of the Census show that regression methods yield historical seasonal factors very similar to those yielded by the ratioto-moving-average method, but that the regression "year-ahead" factors and the trend-cycle curves are less accurate. Criteria for judging a seasonal adjustment. Although it is not now possible to draw a set of hardand-fast rules for judging the success of a seasonal adjustment, five guidelines have proved useful. (a) Any repetitive intrayear pattern present in a series before seasonal adjustment should be eliminated and thus should not appear in the seasonally adjusted series, in the trend-cycle component, or in the irregular component. This implies that the seasonal factors are not correlated with the seasonally adjusted series, or with the trend-cycle or irregular components. (The correlations should be computed year by year, because residual seasonality sometimes shows up with inverse patterns in different years.) (b) The underlying cyclical movements should not be distorted. Seasonally adjusted series that in unadjusted form had a large seasonal factor should be consistent in terms of cyclical amplitude, pattern, and timing with other related economic series that either had no seasonal factor at all or had a small seasonal factor compared with the cyclical factor. Similarly, changes in a seasonally adjusted series such as new orders for machinery and equipment should be followed by like changes in a corresponding series such as sales. (c) The irregular fluctuations should behave like a random series when autocorrelations of lags of about 12 months are considered. Autocorrelations of smaller lags need not necessarily behave like the similar autocorrelations of a random series because some irregular influences, such as a long strike, spread their effects over several months. A seasonally adjusted artificial series containing a random component should produce a random series as the irregular component.
86
TIME SERIES: Seasonal Adjustment
( d ) The sum of the seasonally adjusted series should be equal to the sum of the unadjusted series. For most series, sums are meaningful in economic terms, and the preservation of sums meets the common-sense requirement that the number of units produced, traded, or exported in a year should not be altered by the seasonal adjustment. (e) Revisions in the seasonal factors that take place when data for additional years become available should be relatively small. Tests of seasonal adjustments. With the massive increase in the number of series seasonally adjusted in recent years, due largely to the increasing use of electronic computers for this purpose, the need for routine objective tests of the quality of the adjustments has grown. A general type of test involves examining the results of applying a seasonal adjustment procedure to artificial series. One method of constructing suitable artificial series is to combine the irregular, cyclical, and seasonal factors from different real economic series into artificial aggregates; that is, the seasonal factor from one economic series, the trend-cycle factor from another, and the irregular factor from a third are multiplied together to form a new series. A test of the Bureau of the Census method, using 15 different types of such artificial series, revealed that in most instances the "estimated" components trace a course similar to that of the "true" components (Shiskin 1958). Although some limitations were evident, this test showed that the Census method has considerable power to rediscover the different types of fluctuations that were built into the series and does not generate arbitrary fluctuations that have no relationship to the original observations. A statistical test for the presence of a stable seasonal adjustment component may be made by using the analysis of variance and the associated F-test. This is a test of the null hypothesis that monthly means are equal. Here, the variance estimated from the sum of squares of the differences between the average for each month and the average for all months (between-months variance) is compared with the variance estimated from the sum of squares over all months of the differences between the values for each month and the average for that month (within-months variance). If the betweenmonths variance of the "seasonal-irregular" ratios (computed by dividing the original observations by an estimate of the trend-cycle component) is significantly greater than the within-months variance, it can usually be assumed that there is a true seasonal factor in the series. If the between-months
variance is not significantly greater than the withinmonths variance of the irregular series (computed by dividing the seasonally adjusted series by an estimate of the trend-cycle component), then it can usually be assumed that a complete seasonal adjustment has been made. This test must, however, be used cautiously because differences between months can also appear as a result of differences in the behavior of the irregular component from month to month, because differences between months may be hidden when changes in seasonality in one month are offset by changes in another month, and because the assumptions of the test may not be well satisfied. Nevertheless, the F-test has proved to be a useful test of stable seasonality in practice. [See LINEAR HYPOTHESES, article on ANALYSIS OF VARIANCE.]
Experience in applying spectral analysis to physical science data has encouraged researchers to explore its use in economics, and this technique is now being used to test for seasonality. Spectral analysis distributes the total variance of a series according to the proportion that is accounted for by each of the cycles of all possible periodicities, in intervals for 2-month and longer cycles. If there is a seasonal pattern in a series, a large proportion of the variance will be accounted for by the 12-month cycle and its harmonics (cycles of 6, 4, 3, 2.4, and 2 months). A significant proportion of the total variance of a seasonally adjusted economic series should be accounted for by a cycle of 45 to 50 months, the average duration of the business cycle, but not by the 12-month cycle or its harmonics. A random series would not be expected to show a significant cycle at any periodicity. While quantitative statistical methods based on suitable assumptions for economic time series have not yet been developed for determining from a spectrum whether seasonality exists, such judgments can often be made from inspection of charts of the spectra. A question sometimes raised about spectral analysis is whether it is appropriate to consider an economic time series from the viewpoint of the frequency domain, as spectral analysis does, rather than the time domain, as most other methods do. This question comes up mainly because economic series are available for relatively short periods and economic cycles, other than the seasonal, are irregular in length and amplitude. However, the prospect that mathematical representation of a time series in this way may reveal relationships not otherwise apparent would appear to make this alternative view worth further exploration. These tests do not provide enough information
TIME SERIES: Seasonal Adjustment to determine whether all the criteria listed above are satisfied. To this end, comparisons of the sums of seasonally adjusted and unadjusted data are also made, often for all fiscal years in addition to calendar years. The magnitude of revisions resulting from different methods of seasonal adjustment is usually appraised by seasonally adjusting series which cover periods successively longer by one year (e.g., 1948-1954, 1948-1955, 1948-1956, and so forth) and comparing the seasonal factors for the terminal years with the "ultimate" seasonal factors. Relations of seasonal to other fluctuations. An analysis has been made of the cyclical, seasonal, and irregular amplitudes of a sample of about 150 series considered broadly representative of the different activities of the U.S. economy. This study revealed that, for the post-World War n period, seasonal movements dominate other kinds of monthto-month movements in most current economic series. Seasonal movements are almost always larger than either the irregular or the cyclical movements, and they are often larger than both of the other types combined. More specifically, the average monthly amplitude of the seasonal fluctuations exceeds that of the cyclical factor in 78 per cent of the series, exceeds the irregular factor in 65 per cent of the series, and exceeds the cycle-trend and irregular factors in combination in 45 per cent of the series. Furthermore, where the seasonal factor is larger, it is often much larger. The seasonal factor is three or more times as large as the cyclical factor in 45 per cent of the series, three or more times as large as the irregular factor in 16 per cent of the series, and three or more times as large as the cyclical and irregular fluctuations together in 11 per cent of the series. (See Shiskin 1958.) These results apply to observations of change over intervals of one month; over longer spans the relative importance of the several components would, of course, be different. Table 1 shows how seasonal and trading day fluctuations, which dominate the short-term movements, give way in relative importance to the trend-cycle factor when comparisons are made over longer periods. These findings emphasize the advantages of seasonally adjusted series over those not so adjusted for studying cyclical movements. Where the seasonal fluctuations are large, a difference in the unadjusted data for two months may be due largely or solely to normal seasonal fluctuations; if the data are seasonally adjusted, the difference can be assumed to be caused chiefly by cyclical or irregular factors. JULIUS SHISKIN
87
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Much of the material in this article is discussed in greater detail in Shiskin 1957a; 1958; and the Shiskin paper in Organization for European Economic Cooperation 1961. References that deal with the problem of seasonal adjustment as it relates to current economic conditions are Organization for European Economic Cooperation 1961 and Shiskin 1957a; 1957b. Early works on seasonality and seasonal adjustment methods are Barton 1941; Burns & Mitchell 1946; Hotelling & Hotelling 1931; Kuznets 1933; Macaulay 1931; and Persons 1919a; 1919b. Works dealing with the history of the Bureau of the Census method and its variants are Organization for European Economic Cooperation 1961; Shiskin & Eisenpress 1957; Shiskin et al. 1965; and Young 1965. Alternative methods are described in Hannan 1963; Rosenblatt 1963; and U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 1964. Tests of seasonal adjustment methods are discussed in Burns & Mitchell 1946; Granger & Hatanaka 1964; Hannan 1963; Kuznets 1933; Rosenblatt 1963; and Shiskin 1957b. BARTON, H. C. JR. 1941 Adjustment for Seasonal Variation. Federal Reserve Bulletin 27:518-528. BURNS, ARTHUR F.; and MITCHELL, WESLEY C. 1946 Measuring Business Cycles. National Bureau of Economic Research, Studies in Business Cycles, No. 2. New York: The Bureau. H> See especially pages 43-55, "Treatment of Seasonal Variations" and "Notes on the Elimination of Seasonal Variations." GRANGER, CLIVE W. J.; and HATANAKA, M. 1964 Spectral Analysis of Economic Time Series. Princeton Univ. Press. -> See also "Review" by H. O. Wold in Annals of Mathematical Statistics, February 1967, pages 288-293. HANNAN, E. J. 1963 The Estimation of Seasonal Variations in Economic Time Series. Journal of the American Statistical Association 58:31-44. HOTELLING, HAROLD; and HOTELLING, FLOY 1931 Causes of Birth Rate Fluctuations. Journal of the American Statistical Association 26:135-149. KUZNETS, SIMON 1933 Seasonal Variations in Industry and Trade. New York: National Bureau of Economic Research. MACAULAY, FREDERICK R. 1931 The Smoothing of Time Series. New York: National Bureau of Economic Research. ORGANIZATION FOR EUROPEAN ECONOMIC COOPERATION 1961 Seasonal Adjustment on Electronic Computers. Report and proceedings of an international conference held in November 1960. Paris: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. PERSONS, WARREN M. 1919a Indices of Business Conditions. Review of Economics and Statistics 1:5-107. PERSONS, WARREN M. 1919£> An Index of General Business Conditions. Review of Economics and Statistics 1:111-205. ROSENBLATT, HARRY M. (1963) 1965 Spectral Analysis and Parametric Methods for Seasonal Adjustment of Economic Time Series. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Working Paper No. 23. Washington: Government Printing Office. -> First published in American Statistical Association, Business and Economics Section, Proceedings, pages 94-133. SHISKIN, JULIUS 1957a Electronic Computers and Business Indicators. National Bureau of Economic Research, Occasional Paper No. 57. New York: The Bureau. -> First published in Volume 30 of the Journal of Business.
88
TITCHENER, EDWARD B.
SHISKIN, JULIUS 1957b Seasonal Adjustments of Economic Indicators: A Progress Report. Pages 39-63 in American Statistical Association, Business and Economics Section, Proceedings. Washington: The Association. SHISKIN, JULIUS 1958 Decomposition of Economic Time Series. Science 128:1539-1546. SHISKIN, JULIUS; and EISENPRKSS, HARRY (1957) 1958 Seasonal Adjustments by Electronic Computer Methods. National Bureau of Economic Research, Technical Paper No. 12. New York: The Bureau. -> First published in Volume 52 of the Journal of the American Statistical Association. SHISKIN, JULIUS et al. 1965 The X-ll Variant of the Census Method. II: Seasonal Adjustment Program. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Technical Paper No. 15. Washington: The Bureau. U.S. BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS 1964 The BLS Seasonal Factor Method (1964). Washington: The Bureau. U.S. BUREAU OF THE CENSUS Monthly Retail Trade Report [1966]: August. YOUNG, ALLAN H. 1965 Estimating Trading-day Variation in Monthly Economic Time Series. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Technical Paper No. 12. Washington: The Bureau.
TITCHENER, EDWARD B. Edward Bradford Titchener (1867-1927), a psychologist, was born in England, reared in the German (Wundtian) tradition, and spent his adult, professional years in America. He spent his early years in Chichester, an ancient Roman city about seventy miles south of London, as the elder of two children and the only son of John and Alice Field (Habin) Titchener. He died in Ithaca, New York, from a cerebral tumor. Titchener was a precocious and studious lad, and it was well for him that he was, because his father's early death meant that there was no financial assistance forthcoming for his education. After his elementary training at the prebendal school in Chichester, of which his grandfather was at one time headmaster, he had to rely for his further education upon scholarships and other academic awards won by his own efforts. In 1881, when he was 14 years old, Titchener went to Malvern College in Worcestershire on such a scholarship. He did well there, for, as the story goes, James Russell Lowell, who one year distributed the prizes at the school, remarked, after he had presented the youthful Titchener with several prizes and saw the lad advance for still another, "I am tired of seeing you, Mr. Titchener." After Malvern, Titchener went in 1885 to Brasenose College, Oxford, on a senior scholarship in classics and philosophy and as Hulman "exhibitioner"—a supplementary scholarship awarded
on the basis of need as well as excellence. Near the end of his classical training, he elected a course in physiology under John Scott Burdon-Sanderson, regius professor of medicine at Oxford, and became so absorbed in that subject that he delayed his graduation one year, until 1890, to devote himself to it. During this time he translated into English the third edition of Wundt's huge two-volume Grundzuge der physiologischen Psychologic (18731874). He was attracted by Wundt's combination of philosophy and psychology and by his promise of a new experimental science of psychology; in the fall of 1890 he went to study in Wundt's laboratory in Leipzig. Titchener received his PH.D. degree after only two years' study at Leipzig. In that short period he assimilated Wundt's system and completed two experimental researches: his doctoral dissertation on the binocular effects of monocular stimulation and a study on the chronometry of cognition. At Leipzig he was also permanently influenced by the positivism of Ernst Mach and Avenarius. At that time, psychology was not recognized as a science in England, and although Titchener would have preferred to remain in his homeland, he had to go elsewhere to obtain a position in psychology and a laboratory. In the fall of 1892 he accepted an assistant professorship at Cornell and became head of the newly established laboratory of psychology there. His advancement at Cornell was rapid: in 1895, when he was only 28 years old, he was promoted to the Sage professorship of psychology, and in 1910, when he was offered the chairmanship of the department of psychology at Clark University, Cornell made him a professor in the graduate school, thus relieving him from undergraduate teaching. (After a short time, he missed the contacts with the undergraduates, and after receiving an additional appointment in the arts college, he resumed his popular undergraduate lectures and his direction of the undergraduate laboratories.) Titchener represented the Wundtian point of view in America. He insisted that psychology is a science and that as a science it is concerned with description, not with use or application. He stood throughout his life for the scientific study of the generalized, normal, adult human mind. In 1898, in an article called "The Postulates of a Structural Psychology," he accepted James's differentiation between the structural and functional points of view of mind, and thereafter he was known as the leader of the "structural school," which stood in opposition to the more popular "functional school" led by Dewey, James, and Angell. When behavior-
TITCHENER, EDWARD B. ism superseded functional psychology in America, Titchener opposed it on the grounds that behaviorism is biology, not psychology, and that it ignores the very problems that are the proper concern of psychology: the study of experience as dependent on an experiencing individual, that is, on a nervous system. He was deeply interested in the experimental results of gestalt psychology and readily accepted them, but not their interpretation. He maintained that the gestalt approach was too narrow, being concerned only with "perception" and with only one aspect of it, that is, "form." Titchener saw it as one of his first tasks in America to make the "new" German psychology available in English. He published translations of three successive editions of Kiilpe's Outlines of Psychology; with his colleague J. E. Creighton, he translated three editions of Wundt's Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology, and with his colleague J. H. Gulliver, he translated two editions of Wundt's Ethics. Also, with his student W. B. Pillsbury, he translated Kiilpe's Introduction to Philosophy. Titchener's translations of Wundt's Physiologische Psychologic could never quite keep up with Wundt's new editions of the work. The first book that Titchener wrote, An Outline of Psychology (1896), was patterned after Kiilpe's Outlines and thus also served to introduce German psychology into American universities. It went through many printings and three editions, as did his second book, A Primer of Psychology (1898Z?). In a further effort to make the teaching of psychology comparable to that of other scientific subjects, Titchener put together his famous twovolume work Experimental Psychology: A Manual of Laboratory Practice. It was patterned after manuals used in chemistry: one volume (1901) dealt with qualitative experiments and one (1905) with quantitative ones, and each of these volumes was further divided into two parts—a Student's Manual and an Instructors Manual. In the Student's Manual, Titchener presented a number of classical experiments that had "disciplinary value to the undergraduate student"; the Instructors Manual gave the instructors a wealth of background information about the selected experiments. The publication of Quantitative Experiments was delayed by the appearance in 1904 of G. E. Miiller's Gesichtspunkte und Tatsachen der psychologischen Methodik, which covered much the same subject matter. Titchener was sorely tempted, as he explained in the Preface to the Instructor's Manual, "to leave my text as it stood and to take account of Miiller's book simply in footnote references . . . but the better counsel prevailed" (1901-
89
1905, vol. 2, part 2, p. iii). He embodied Miiller's new results in his exposition. Titchener then turned to problems of attention, feeling, and thought. In 1908 he published Lectures on the Elementary Psychology of Feeling and Attention. He sought to give the concept of feeling an independent, elementary status and to enhance the scientific validity of the concept of attention by relating it to specific aspects of the sensory experience. From among the various terms that had historically been used to describe change in the attentive consciousness, Titchener chose "clearness." It was an unfortunate choice because of the word's many connotations. Later he changed the term to "vividness" and still later to "attensity," but the confusion persisted, and his concept of attention, although widely discussed, was not widely accepted. The following year, Titchener published Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of the Thought-processes (1909a). This work constituted an attack on the theory of Kiilpe and the Wiirzburg school that thought is "imageless." Kulpe and his students were unable to analyze the thought processes and therefore concluded that thought is a separate, conscious element, comparable to sensations. Titchener repeated Kulpe's experiments at Cornell, corroborating most of the results but drawing very different conclusions from them. He asserted that these results did not warrant the abandonment of the view that thought is imaginal and sensory, and he provided a theory to explain the apparently imageless character of "imageless thought." Accepting N. Ach's concept of the determining tendency and the premise of the Wiirzburg school that thought may be unconscious, he offered the context theory of meaning, according to which "meaning is the conscious sensory or imaginal context that accrues (associatively, it would seem) to the initial sensory core of a perception or the initial imaginal core of an idea" (Boring [1929] 1950, p. 415). This theory sought to account for the lack of analyzable content in the results of the Wiirzburg experiments on thought. Titchener wrote two more textbooks. A Textbook of Psychology (1909&) was too systematic and too sophisticated for elementary courses in psychology. In 1915 he published A Beginner's Psychology, which was more suitable as an introductory text. Since he was never able to complete a projected three-volume work on systematic psychology, his textbooks are the only systematic accounts of his psychology that he left. Titchener was elected a charter member of the American Psychological Association but soon with-
90
TOCQUEVILLE, ALEXIS DE
drew: he resented the association's failure to take action against a member who had plagiarized his translation of Wundt. Since, however, he missed the contacts with his colleagues that the annual meetings provided, he invited the heads of ten of the most prominent laboratories in the country to attend a conference on experimental psychology at Cornell in the spring of 1904. The group, unofficially known as "The Experimentalists," thereafter met annually; after Titchener's death, it became a more formal organization, the Society of Experimental Psychologists. The list of Titchener's honors is long, including honorary degrees from Oxford, Wisconsin, Harvard, and Clark, and memberships in the American Philosophical Society and the Royal Society of Medicine in England. He was coeditor of the American Journal of Psychology from 1895 to 1920 and sole editor from 1921 to 1925. From 1894 to 1920 he was also the American editor of Mind. His own list of publications was long (216); many other works (176) came from his students in the Cornell laboratory. Clearly, he was one of the most respected and influential figures in the development of the discipline of psychology in America. KARL M. DALLENBACH
BORING, EDWIN G. (1929) 1950 A History of Experimental Psychology. 2d ed. New York: Appleton. DALLENBACH, KARL M. 1928 Bibliography of the Writings of Edward Bradford Titchener: 1917-1927. Journal of Psychology 40:121-125. FOSTER, WILLIAM S. 1917 A Bibliography of the Published Writings of Edward Bradford Titchener: 18891917. Pages 323-337 in Studies in Psychology. Worcester, Mass.: Wilson. KULPE, OSWALD (1893) 1909 Outlines of Psychology, Based Upon the Results of Experimental Investigation. 2d ed. Translated by Edward Bradford Titchener. London: Sonnenschein; New York: Macmillan -» First published as Grundriss der Psychologic, auf experimenteller Grundlage dargestellt. Titchener was also the translator of the 1895 and 1901 English editions. PILLSBURY, W. B. 1928 The Psychology of Edward Bradford Titchener. Philosophical Review 37:95-108. Studies in Psychology. 1917 Worcester, Mass.: Wilson. -> A volume presented to Titchener by his colleagues and former students in recognition of the 25th anniversary of his doctorate. WARREN, HOWARD C. 1927 Edward Bradford Titchener. Science 66:208-209. WUNDT, WILHELM (1873) 1905 Principles of Physiological Psychology. Translated by Edward Bradford Titchener and J. E. Creighton. London: Sonnenschein; New York: Macmillan. -* First published as Volume 1 of Wilhelm Wundt's Grundziige der physiologischen Psychologic. Titchener and Creighton were also the translators of the 1894, 1896, and 1901 editions.
[For the historical context of Titchener's work, see the biographies of JAMES; KULPE; MULLER, GEORG ELIAS; WUNDT ; for discussion of the subsequent development of his ideas, see ATTENTION; PSYCHOPHYSICS; SENSES.]
TOCQUEVILLE, ALEXIS DE
WORKS BY TITCHENER (1896) 1902 An Outline of Psychology. New ed., enl. New York: Macmillan. 1898a The Postulates of a Structural Psychology. Philosophical Review 7:449-465. (1898k) 1925 A Primer of Psychology. Rev. ed. New York: Macmillan. 1901-1905 Experimental Psychology: A Manual of Laboratory Practice. 2 vols. New York and London: Macmillan. -» Volume 1: Qualitative Experiments, 2 parts. Volume 2: Quantitative Experiments, 2 parts. 1908 Lectures on the Elementary Psychology of Feeling and Attention. New York: Macmillan. 1909a Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of the Thought-processes. New York: Macmillan. (19096) 1910 A Textbook of Psychology. New York: Macmillan. 1910 The Past Decade in Experimental Psychology. American Journal of Psychology 21:404—421. 1915 A Beginner's Psychology. New York: Macmillan. 1929 Systematic Psychology: Prolegomena. New York: Macmillan. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
ANGELL, FRANK 1928 Titchener at Leipzig. Journal of General Psychology 1:195-198. BORING, EDWIN G. 1927 Edward Bradford Titchener. Journal of General Psychology 38:489-506.
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) lived at the time of two revolutions, the democratic and the industrial; their impact upon the traditional order furnished him with the major themes of his scholarly work. Tension between traditional and modern values dominated Tocqueville's life and writings. Convinced of the irreversibility of democracy and contemptuous of reactionaries who thought they could block this historical movement, he was nevertheless obsessed by the erosion of those traditional contexts and values—aristocracy, honor, localism, religion, cultural variety—on which European liberty had depended for so many centuries. In his personal life this conflict of values proved almost too great to contain, and in his final years he succumbed to melancholy, despairing of the future of liberty and culture in Europe. It was this same tension, however, that provided the underlying creative impulse behind the extraordinarily dispassionate analyses of modern society contained in his two major works, Democracy in America (1835) and The Old Regime and the French Revolution (1856). In these, Tocqueville formulated analytical perspectives that were to prove fruitful both for the continued study of Western society and for the study of the non-Western
TOCQUEVILLE, ALEXIS DE societies which in the twentieth century are undergoing a modernization strikingly akin to what fascinated Tocqueville in the "first new nation," the United States. Behind Tocqueville's analytical perspectives, and giving them coherence, is a unified philosophy of history that rests on what he called "the principle of equality." What class struggle was for Marx, Gesellschaft for Tonnies, and rationalization for Max Weber, equalitarianism was for Tocqueville. Each of these men endowed a single dynamic aspect of the social order with decisive developmental significance. In Tocqueville's eyes, the master principle of European history was the relentless leveling of social ranks that, he believed, had been going on since the end of the Middle Ages—a leveling as inexorable as it was universal in Europe, one that touched literally every sphere of society and culture. It is this principle of social development that gives meaning to the major areas of fact and insight into which his sociological work falls. There are four such areas: power, stratification, industrialism, and mass culture. Power. Tocqueville was fascinated by the problem of power, particularly the power of the modern democratic state. The impact of centralized, massbased sovereignty upon the traditional authorities of family, local community, social class, and morality is a theme in his work second only to that of equalitarianism. The two themes are, indeed, inseparable. Tocqueville was not the first to emphasize the affinity between social equality and political centralization, but his Democracy in America is certainly the first systematic treatment of the subject, just as his Old Regime and the French Revolution is the first scholarly demonstration of the roots of the French Revolution in the history of European administrative centralization. From the vantage point of contemporary sociology, three aspects of his consideration of power are noteworthy: the affinity between mass equality and bureaucracy, the role of public opinion, and the relation between political power and "secondary" or "intermediate" social authorities. In the history of European polity, Tocqueville wrote (anticipating Weber), "the substitution of paid for unpaid functionaries is of itself . . . sufficient to constitute a real revolution" ([1835] 1945, vol. 1, p. 208). Democracy inevitably has an accelerative influence upon bureaucracy, for unpaid political service can be performed only by the rich and privileged, whose very existence frustrates the objectives of democracy. Hence it is possible, he wrote, to measure the progress of democracy in a nation by the rate of increase of paid functionaries.
91
Tocqueville saw the relation between bureaucratic centralization and social equalitarianism not only as historical but also as functional. All that erodes social hierarchy, regionalism, and localism is bound to intensify centralization in the state. Conversely, all that furthers the development of political centralization—war, dynastic ambition, and revolution—is bound to accelerate social leveling. While the major cause of modern bureaucracy is the democratization of power, Tocqueville identified four factors which account for its variable intensity from nation to nation: revolution, the role of the lower classes, level of literacy, and war. When revolution ushers in democracy, as in France, it makes for a higher degree of initial centralization than is the case when democracy evolves gradually, as in the United States. When the lower classes hold the balance of power, administration tends to be centralized, for this is the only means whereby the lower classes can wrest power from local aristocracy. The lower the level of literacy in a population, the greater and more inevitable the tendency to concentrate administration in an educated, governing elite. Finally, "All men of military genius are fond of centralization . . . and all men of centralizing genius are fond of war" (ibid., vol. 2, p. 300). The relation between Tocqueville's "administrative centralization" and what Weber was to call "rationalization" is, of course, very close. Both saw conflict between bureaucracy and the democratic impulses that had helped produce it. Tocqueville's depiction of the sort of despotism democratic nations have to fear is almost indistinguishable in tenor from that found two generations later in Weber's melancholy ruminations on administrative rationalization. For both men, any future despotism would emerge not primarily from individuals or groups but from the bureaucratic system per se. Tocqueville's dominating interest in public opinion followed from his view that the locus of democratic power is in mass majorities. What he called "the tyranny of the majority"—at bottom the sway of public opinion—may be more stifling to individuality, as it was in America, than even the medieval Inquisition had been. Despite his profound interest in public opinion, he had no clear awareness of its sources. It does not seem to have occurred to him that public opinion is something that can be manufactured by minority pressure groups. He conceived of it as a more or less direct emanation from the political masses. But if he did not explore its sources and variable expressions, he nevertheless correctly identified it as a new and powerful force in the modern state, one henceforth
92
TOCQUEVILLE, ALEXIS DE
crucial to the legitimacy of governments. Equally important, Tocqueville, in contrast to most political conservatives of his day, feared not the instability but the stability of public opinion in democracy, a stability so great, in his view, that not only political revolution but even intellectual innovation would become increasingly unlikely. The role of "secondary" or "intermediate" authorities in democracy was a prime concern of Tocqueville's. Liberty, in his view, has little to do with the breadth of political power or the extent of mass participation in it. Liberty can exist only where there are countervailing authorities which stand as buffers between the individual and the central government. Traditional secondary authorities—aristocracy, guild, commune—had been eroded by the impact of equalitarian democracy. Tocqueville asked what authorities, if any, had succeeded these. In Europe he found almost none; hence his growing pessimism about the future of liberty there. In America, however, the great profusion of voluntary associations, the power and independence of local communities, the professions (especially the legal profession), and the whole system of division of powers within the political government seemed to him the effective basis of a pluralism that might restrain the powers of both majority opinion and administrative centralization. A distinction between authority and power is fundamental in Tocqueville, authority being the inner nature of association, rooted in function and allegiance, while power is coercion, generally with the implication of force externally applied. It is in terms of this distinction that his treatment of family, local community, master-servant, professional, and other social relationships can most readily be understood. Each of these, for Tocqueville, is a pattern of constraints as well as of activities, and its internal strength is a function of its relative immunity from political power. Stratification. Tocqueville's theory of social stratification follows from his conception of power. He is at the opposite extreme from Marx, who found in the capitalist class essentially the same union of power, wealth, and status that had characterized the feudal nobility. According to Tocqueville, the dominant tendency of modern history is toward the disengagement of these three elements from one another. Social class, in the sense of selfconscious and culturally distinct classes, is precluded in modern society by exactly the same forces that destroyed feudal aristocracy: political centralization, the greater importance of money, and civil equality. There are levels of wealth and privilege, but the nature of democracy and of a money-based economy prevents these levels from
hardening into real classes. Tocqueville was by no means blind to the power of manufacturing interests and their remoteness from workers. Indeed, he speculated on how "an aristocracy may be created by manufactures/' But however dangerous the power of manufacturers may be to the politics of democracy, manufacturers do not and cannot constitute a genuine social class. For while the category is fixed by industrialism, the content is ever-changing; incessant mobility prevents the crystallizing of attitudes and culture, the sinking of roots, and the socially recognized eminence that social class requires. What struck Tocqueville was the immense middle class in the United States. This class was neither rich nor poor; its position made it, in his view, a vast arena for status aspiration. Tocqueville's theory of stratification, in short, rests on status mobility rather than class. The decline of traditional class, far from lessening the desire for elevation of status, only intensifies it. When it is birth alone that ranks men in society, Tocqueville observed, everyone knows exactly what his own position is in the social scale. "He does not seek to rise, he does not fear to sink." But when equalitarianism prevails and money becomes the basis of rank in society, the desire to rise is matched by the fear of sinking in the social scale. The principle of equality is accompanied not by love of equality but by obsession with social status. "When inequality of conditions is the common law of society, the most marked inequalities do not strike the eye; when everything is nearly on the same level, the slightest [inequalities] are marked enough to hurt it. Hence the desire of equality always becomes more insatiable in proportion as equality is more complete" (ibid., vol. 2, p. 138). It is preoccupation with status that above all else explains why "Americans are so restless in the midst of their prosperity": a restlessness making for unhappiness on a wide scale. In France, Tocqueville wrote, this status anxiety produces high rates of suicide; in America, high rates of insanity. Tocqueville provided two classic paradigms of social status in modern democracy, each the subject of a long chapter. The first is the masterservant relation. Tension is the very essence of this relation, Tocqueville observed, given a setting in which civil equality is dogma as well as law. An "imperfect phantom of equality" haunts the mind of servant and master alike, making obedience as confused and reluctant a sentiment in the first as unwonted command is in the second. The same problem of context has dislocated the historic notion of honor. The social roots of this value, Tocqueville showed, are feudal, and all that has weakened
TOCQUEVILLE, ALEXIS DE the hierarchical arid personal character of European society has weakened the structural possibility of honor as a cementing value. Yet honor, like status, is, he noted, a verbal obsession of Americans. The subtlety and perception of Tocqueville's sociological treatment of these two values remained unmatched until Weber's and Simmel's work. In one sphere only did Tocqueville see the outline and substance of genuine social class in America: the Negro-white relationship. In the South, where slavery made a caste of the Negro, issues of status and mobility were nonexistent, but if Negroes "are once raised to the level of freemen, they will soon revolt at being deprived of almost all their civil rights; and as they cannot become the equals of the whites, they will speedily show themselves as enemies" (ibid., vol. 1, p. 378). Equally perceptive are Tocqueville's observations on the status of the Negro in the North, where, though legally free, the Negro encountered a different type of segregation. "I have remarked that the white inhabitants of the North avoid the Negroes with increasing care in proportion as the legal barriers of separation are removed by the legislature" (ibid., vol. 1, p. 375). It was visibility that made real assimilation between the two races a distant and dim prospect in Tocqueville's eyes. Recalling the long ages required in Europe for the erasure of social distinction between noble and commoner, he wrote: "I despair of seeing an aristocracy disappear which is founded upon visible and indelible signs" (ibid,, vol. 1, p. 358). The only real possibility of extreme social conflict, even revolution, that Tocqueville could foresee in America was that between Negro and white. One final element of Tocqueville's picture of stratification must be mentioned: intellectual and political elites. Here the social scene he was describing was not America but France, in the age just prior to the French Revolution. It was at this time, according to Tocqueville, that writers and philosophers became, for the first time, a significant political force, one that replaced traditional aristocracy. Intensely rationalist in temper, drawn to the uses of political power, and scornful of tradition, this group, which included all of the philosophes, became "a power in the country and ended up as its political leaders." Burke preceded Tocqueville in identifying the political role of the literary elite in eighteenth-century France, but Tocqueville showed that such elites are as inevitable an emergent of modern society as any of the other types or groups. Industrialism. Despite the overwhelmingly political nature of Tocqueville's treatment of modernism, that is, his view that modern culture and the modern economy are direct consequences of the
93
growth of power and of its diffusion, he was keenly aware of the social impact of the new industrialism. This is why he emphasized the money base of social stratification of the new democratic society and why he studied such matters as technology, division of labor, wages, land rents, and cyclical business depression. All of these were placed by Tocqueville within the political perspective of democracy. He did not share the view of the economists of his time that economic phenomena have either primary or self-contained reality. For Tocqueville, economic behavior is a derivative of politics rather than vice versa. Tocqueville foresaw recurring economic crisis as "an endemic disease" of modern democratic nations, but he attributed this not to any iron law of depression of wages under private property (indeed, Tocqueville prophesied the long-run rise of wages and democracy) but to the "democratic propensity" to convert slow-yield ownership of land into commercial holdings, thus destroying the historic balance between agriculture and commerce. He noted the absence in America of any genuine agrarian culture and mentality— democracy tends to "make agriculture itself a trade." Land is brought into tillage in order that it may be resold, not farmed. As the politics of democracy breeds desire for advancement in the social scale, it aids also in the conversion of wealth into those forms—negotiable shares, money, credit —which are helpful to this advancement. Tocqueville's view of the human impact of technology and division of labor is rather pessimistic. Admitting that these forces stimulate economic production, he nevertheless thought that they represent a new form of enslavement and degradation of man. It is the specialization of the worker under industrialism that seemed to Tocqueville to be most fraught with evil. "In proportion as the principle of the division of labor is more extensively applied, the workman becomes more weak, more narrowminded, and more dependent. The art advances, the artisan recedes" (ibid., vol. 2, p. 159). Mass culture. Tocqueville was the first to assess systematically the effects of democracy and commercialism upon the arts, literature, religion, philosophy, and other areas of culture. Here, as in his perspectives on power and stratification, equalitarianism is the dominant element. He thought it unlikely that America would produce artists and writers of stature. His words were written, it is amusing to note, only a decade before the New England "renaissance" that brought forth such major writers as Melville, Hawthorne, Emerson, and Thoreau. Nevertheless, the reasons he gave have proved durable in the continuing sociological analysis of mass culture. There is, first, the power
94
TOCQUEVILLE, ALEXIS DE
of mass opinion, which puts so heavy a premium upon conformity that true humanistic genius will be intimidated. Second is the fact that in democracy, literature and the arts in general become a trade. "The ever increasing crowd of readers and their continual craving for something new ensure the sale of books that nobody much esteems" (ibid., vol. 2, p. 61). Third is the gradual disappearance of great cultural themes in the wash of mediocrity that attends adulation of the common man and fear of the extraordinary. "In aristocracies a few great pictures are produced; in democratic countries a vast number of insignificant ones. In the former statues are raised of bronze; in the latter, they are modeled in plaster" (ibid., vol. 2, p. 51). Tocqueville did not doubt that there would be an unprecedented spread of literacy and taste for art and philosophy, but he feared that it would be at the level of the lowest common denominator. In science Tocqueville foresaw the limitless practical application of what had already been discovered, but not the discovery of fresh knowledge, for while "the purely practical part of science is admirably understood," it remains true that "hardly anyone in the United States devotes himself to the essential theoretical and abstract portion of human knowledge." The spirit of technicism, Tocqueville thought, makes scientific vitality as unlikely as artistic, although in both areas "the number of those who cultivate science, letters, and arts becomes immense" (ibid., vol. 2, p. 42). Philosophy and religion are shaped by the social contexts of both democracy and commerce. In philosophy there is a taste for broad, general ideas that are accessible to all without undue effort and which permit people to "flatter themselves that they can delineate vast objects with little pains and draw the attention of the public without much trouble" (ibid., vol. 2, p. 17). It is this intellectual predilection, according to Tocqueville, that creates a natural affinity between democracy and Cartesianism, with its emphasis on intuitively reached principles that are open to all men of common sense. Religion in democracy is characterized by a dislike of ceremony and form that affects even Roman Catholicism, whose priests in America "show less taste for minute individual observances" than is the case in Europe. Tocqueville was struck by the high rate of converts to Catholicism in the United States and explained this, first, by the theological affinity between Catholic doctrine and the notion of a leveled laity under the priest and, second, by the social affinity between Catholic minority status and those parties (chiefly the emerging Democratic party) in which equality rather than
achievement or privilege is the goal. Tocqueville viewed drama, history writing, oratory, language, and the study of the classics from the same perspective, emerging in each instance with a conclusion that rests upon the spread of popular themes, forms, and idioms, and the unlikelihood of the kind of high quality that had been known in aristocratic ages. Influence. Tocqueville's impact was immediate upon scholars in both Europe and America, but the shape of this impact was very different on the two continents. In America, until about the 1940s, Tocqueville was thought of essentially as a political philosopher. Attention was fixed chiefly on the sections of the first volume of Democracy in America which are concerned with the processes of political government. For a long time he was hardly known in America as a sociologist of stratification, culture, religion, and industry. In Europe, it was the sociological elements of his work—those found in the second volume of Democracy in America and The Old Regime—that early proved of greatest influence. His distinction between power, class, and status and his emphasis upon the mass potential of modern democracy, upon administrative centralization, and upon the mass character of modern culture supplied the theoretical background for the more detailed and systematic treatments of these forces that flourished in the sociology of France, Italy, and Germany at the end of the century. Burckhardt, Taine, Le Play, Acton, Tonnies, Weber, Simmel, and Michels all employed perspectives based on Tocqueville. Tocqueville and Marx are, in a real sense, the two magnetic poles of European sociology: Tocqueville, in his emphasis upon equalitarianism and the separation of power, wealth, and status, and his preview of totalitarianism as resulting from the leveling of classes; Marx, in his emphasis upon class conflict, the coalescence (in the bourgeoisie) of power, wealth, and status, and his vision of freedom finally achieved through the very equality that, for Tocqueville, carried the seeds of despotism. ROBERT A. NISBET [See also ANGLO-AMERICAN SOCIETY; DEMOCRACY; MASS SOCIETY; PLURALISM; POLITICS, COMPARATIVE; PRESIDENTIAL GOVERNMENT; PUBLIC OPINION; SOCIAL MOBILITY; STRATIFICATION, SOCIAL; VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS; and the biographies of BAGEHOT; BRYCE; LE PLAY; LINDSAY; MICHELS; SIMMEL; TONNIES; WEBER, MAX.] WORKS BY TOCQUEVILLE (1832) 1964 BEAUMONT DE LA BONNINIERE, GUSTAVE AUGUSTE DE; and TOCQUEVILLE, ALEXIS DE On the Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Ap-
TOLMAN, EDWARD C. plication in France. New ed. With an introduction by Thorsten Sellin and a foreword by Herman R. Lantz. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press. -> First published in French. (1835) 1945 Democracy in America. 2 vols. Translated by Henry Reeve, revised by Francis Bowen, and edited by Phillips Bradley. New York: Knopf. -» First published in French. A new edition, translated by George Lawrence, edited by J. P. Mayer, and with an introductory essay by Max Lerner, was published by Harper in 1966. Paperback editions were published in 1961 by Vintage and by Schocken. (1856) 1955 The Old Regime and the French Revolution. Translated by Stuart Gilbert. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. -* First published as L'ancien regime et la revolution. (1893) 1949 The Recollections of Alexis de Tocqueville. Edited by J. P. Mayer. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. -» First published posthumously in French. A paperback edition was published in 1959 by Meridian. Oeuvres completes d'Alexis de Tccqueville. 2d ed. Published by Mme. de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont. 9 vols. Paris: Levy, 1866-1878. -* The first edition was published in 1860-1865. Oeuvres, papiers $t correspondances. Final edition by J. P. Mayer. Vols. 1—. Paris: Gallimard, 1951—. -> Volumes 1, 2, 31, 51-2, 6, 9, and 12 have been published to date. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
EICHTHAL, EUGENE D' 1897 Alexis de Tocqueville et la democratic liber ale. Paris: Levy. GORING, HELMUT 1928 Tocqueville und die Demokratie. Munich: Oldenbourg. MARCEL, R. PIERRE 1910 Essai politique sur Alexis de Tocqueville. Paris: Alcan. MAYER, J. P. 1960 Alexis de Tocqueville: A Biographical Study in Political Science. New York: Harper. NISRET, RORERT A. 1967 The Sociological Tradition. New York: Basic Books. PIERSON, GEORGE W. 1938 Tocqueville and Beaumont in America. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
TOLERANCE See PREJUDICE; STEREOTYPES. TOLERANCE SETS See ESTIMATION, article on CONFIDENCE INTERVALS AND REGIONS.
TOLMAN, EDWARD C. Edward Chace Tolman (1886-1959), American psychologist and civil libertarian, lived out a meaningful life of paradox. Tolman was a professor who was too shy, felt too inept, and did not have the desire to seek faculty leadership on his campus. Yet, during Berkeley's "Year of the Oath" (1949-1950, when there was a controversy over loyalty oaths at the University of California), it was Tolman (a member of the national board of the American Civil Liberties Union) who led the faculty in full battle
95
against the university regents—a battle that saved academic freedom at the university. Tolman was a behaviorist, but his research and theory evoked from his behavioristic colleagues an agonized search for hidden errors and the fear that he was undermining the development of "objective psychology true and narrow." By the middle of the century, most of his researches, having been tested and retested, were admitted into the official behavioristic corpus and forced a recasting of many of the dominant behavioristic theories. Tolman the experimental psychologist was a "rat man"—unapologetically dedicated to the investigation of the behavior of the laboratory rat (he flaunted his rodent orientation by inscribing his major work, Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men [1932], to M.N.A.—Mus norvegicus albinus). But just as Tolman's behaviorism was suspect to his fellow behaviorists, so was his rat psychology suspect to his fellow "rat men." He found his most enthusiastic supporters among the psychologists concerned with human cognition. When this unpretentious man died on November 19, 1959, his death was noted not only by psychologists (both animal and human) and other learned men (both scientific and humanistic) but also in the nation's capital, where the Washington Post wrote in its editorial: "His death last week is a loss to the nation as well as to the whole academic community." Autobiography. In the History of Psychology in Autobiography, Tolman has written an autobiographical essay in which, so he tells us, he "tried to think out, as a very amateur clinical psychologist, what kind of person I think I am and how I think I got that way . . ." (1952, p. 328). His testimony deserves a full hearing. What follows, however, are only some mercilessly telescoped excerpts from his essay—perhaps they will indicate the nature of the whole. I was born in Newton, Massachusetts in 1886. I went to the Newton Public Schools, . . . and then went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I obtained a B.S. in electrochemistry in 1911. I went to M.I.T. not because I wanted to be an engineer, but because I had been good in mathematics and science in high school and because of family pressure. . . . My father was president of a manufacturing company. . . . My brother, who was five years older, and I were, first one and then the other, expected to go into our father's business. . . . My brother, however, escaped by becoming a theoretical chemist and physicist and I, having read some William James during my senior year at Technology, fancied that I wanted to become a philosopher. Upon graduating from M.I.T., I went to the Harvard summer school and took an introductory course in philosophy with Perry and one
96
TOLMAN, EDWARD C.
in psychology with Yerkes. . . . I decided then and there that I did not have brains enough to become a philosopher (that was still the day of great metaphysical systems), but that psychology was nearer my capacities and interests. It offered, at that date, what seemed a nice compromise between philosophy and science. . . . Although we lived in a well-to-do conventional suburb with stress on appearances, there still persisted in our family . . . the legacy of reformism, equal rights for Negroes, women's rights, Unitarianism and humanitarianism from the earlier days of the "Flowering of New England." These social tendencies were combined with the special Bostonian emphasis on "culture" together with . . . a special dose of moral uplift and pacifism. . . . The rebellion of my brother and of myself against parental domination was in directions which the parents themselves could not too greatly, or too consciously, disapprove. . . . In the fall of 1911, therefore, after only one summer session course in philosophy and one in psychology, I began at Harvard as a full graduate student . . . in the joint department of philosophy and psychology. The courses I remember most vividly were: Perry's course in Ethics, which laid the basis for my later interest in motivation and, indeed, gave me the main concepts (reinforced by a reading of McDougall's Social Psychology as part of the requirement of the course) which I have retained ever since; Holt's course in Experimental . . . Langfeld's course in Advanced General, using Titchener as a textbook, which almost sold me temporarily on structuralistic introspectionism; Holt's seminar in Epistemology in which I was introduced to, and excited by, the "New Realism"; and Yerkes' course in Comparative, using Watson's Behavior—An Introduction to Comparative Psychology, which was just out, as a text. . . . At the end of my first graduate year at Harvard . . . I spent a month in Giessen with Koffka, . . . and so got my first introduction to Gestalt psychology. . . . And in the fall of 1923 I went back to Giessen for a couple of months to learn more. After getting my doctor's degree at Harvard in 1915 I was instructor for three years at Northwestern. During the summer of 1918, . . . I was offered . . . an instructorship at California. From the very first California symbolized for me some sort of a final freeing from my overwhelmingly too Puritanical and too Bostonian upbringing. It would seem meet to indicate the main sources from which I think my ideas have come. First of all most of the credit, if it be credit, should go to all the students whose ideas I have shamefully . . . adopted and exploited . . . and ended up by believing to be my own. Secondly, it should go to my teachers at Harvard who taught me to think, to be critical, to be complicated but to remain naturalistic. Next, it should go to the Gestalt psychologists, but especially to Kurt Lewin. . . . Again, it should go to ... Egon Brunswik, who opened my eyes to the meaning and the viability of the European psychological tradition, both academic and psychoanalytical. . . . (1952, passim)
Systems and psychology. Tolman flourished during the era of the system builders (roughly the period between the two world wars, 1918-1939) when every American psychologist of note had his private system—or at least a "significant variant" of a more commonly held system. This was the period when new men working in new laboratories were becoming increasingly critical of the reigning psychological system elaborated by Wundt in Germany and Titchener in America. And as the inadequacies of structuralism and of its introspective method became more obvious, there began to appear new claimants to the system throne. This throne could not remain vacant. Psychologists had a "felt need" for a system. Certainly this need was not due to the fact that psychology had amassed so many solid observations and had formalized so many general laws that higher-order abstractions were essential to give aesthetic harmony to the whole. It was precisely because psychology did not know what its proper domain was and because it had few reliable facts, general laws, or even acceptable methods that it seemed to require a system. Such a system might give at least a semblance of order to the accumulated heterogeneous observations called "psychological"; of legitimacy to one's methods; and of philosophic sophistication to the proliferating ad-lib conceptualizations. In the United States it was John B. Watson who was the most vigorous "pretender" to the Titchenerian throne. Behaviorism was revealed by Watson in 1913 with his publication of "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It" and thus was known to Tolman before he had finished his graduate studies. It did not immediately get into Tolman's blood, either as a nutrient or as an irritant—later it became both. At Harvard, Tolman was as impressed by the philosophers as he was by the psychologists. In addition, he had been exposed to gestalt psychology. He found it difficult, therefore, even after becoming converted to behaviorism, to remain faithful to Watson's dogma, which professed to see nothing of value in what had gone before 1913, either in philosophy or psychology. And so, in keeping with the imperatives of his time, Tolman set out to build his own system. The development of this system—named by Tolman "purposive behaviorism"—began about 1920 and came into official existence with the publication of his Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men in 1932. It continued to evolve and change as long as Tolman lived; his last theoretical paper, "Principles of Purposive Behavior," bears the publication date of 1959, the year of his death.
TOLMAN, EDWARD C. Purposive behaviorism. Tolman's first formal proposal for a new system is found in his 1922 essay, "A New Formula for Behaviorism." In this paper Tolman expressed his dissatisfaction with "the archbehaviorist, Watson" and his muscletwitch behaviorism. Tolman believed that Watson's self-styled "stimulus-response" psychology is a pseudophysiological approach to behavior. It makes a brave show of defining stimulus and response as physiology defines them, but finding this impossible in dealing with behavior, it ends up with a system which is neither physiologically nor psychologically consistent and which is not capable of adequate behavioral description. (This criticism he was, many years later, to level also at Clark Hull's "neobehaviorism".) But Tolman had a more basic objection to Watson. He could not agree that all of the problems dealt with by introspective psychology need be, or even can be, expunged from a scientific psychology. And so Tolman proposed, in 1922, a "true nonphysiological behaviorism," in this respect antedating and setting the stage for Kenneth W. Spence's variant of Hull's system and B. F. Skinner's variant of behaviorism [see LEARNING, articles On INSTRUMENTAL LEARNING and REINFORCEMENT; DRIVES]. This truly nonphysiological behaviorism, Tolman promised, "will bring under a single rubric all the apparently different and contradictory methods of actual psychology . . . [and] will allow for a more ready and adequate treatment of the problems of motive, purpose, determining tendency, and the like, than was made easy by the older subjectivistic formulation" ([1922] 1951, p. 8). Tolman was to devote the next 37 years to redeeming this pledge. Tolman's system-building was characterized by two major attributes. The first of these was breadth. Like all other system builders of his time, he was "obsessed by a need for a single comprehensive theory or scheme for the whole of psychology" (1952, p. 336), and like all the others, he was to fall short of this grand goal. But where the others sought comprehensiveness by exclusion (denying the existence of many psychological problems and phenomena) or by "monolithism" (attempting to stretch a very few "principles" or "axioms" to cover all behavior), Tolman's approach was to welcome into his purview all that was animal and human and to insist that what he had welcomed was complex and multidetermined. For example, learning theorists of the time were dedicated to the search for one or two universal nostrums, such as "the law of effect" or "conditioning," which would explain the learning process. Tolman's experiments made
97
it quite clear that the learning process is not amenable to easy analysis by these—or other—simple universals. Tolman's formulation of the problem of learning was broadly conceived. It had room for motivational, perceptual, emotional, and many other variables and families of variables. He was the first psychologist to experiment in the area of behavior genetics and was the sole behaviorist to challenge the extreme environmentalism of the 1920s and early 1930s. Eventually he came to entertain the notion that several different kinds of learning processes exist (1949). [See GENETICS, article on GENETICS AND BEHAVIOR.] Among some system builders it became the fashion to attempt to pare down one's system to mathematical statements, fitted curves, or "hypothetico-deductive" predictions. Where others tried (because their formulations were simple enough to permit such attempts) and lost (precisely because their formulations were so simple), Tolman never tried at all. He ended with a "scheme"—not with a set of easily testable theories. This is Tolman's strength and his weakness. Because he wanted to consider everything that mattered, the all-inclusiveness of his system gives a unifying appearance to the many-splintered thing called psychology. Clinical, social, industrial, cognitive, and learning psychologists have repaired thereto and have found comfort in Tolman's scheme—a scheme which promises to show that psychology is a many-splendored, unified thing. Whatever the realities behind his promise to integrate all of psychology, Tolman's system does have the negative, but not inconsiderable, virtue of discouraging the easy promulgation of vague and oversimplified descriptions of behavior and equally ambiguous and undernourished "explanatory principles." The second attribute of Tolman's system-building was his belief that observed correlations between stimuli and responses could be gathered into general laws and could yield fruitful theory only through the use of "intervening variables"—his name for dispositions that direct behavior and that intervene between environmental stimuli and observable responses. Among the intervening variables that Tolman proposed were "cognitions," "expectancies," and "purposes." These "mentalistic" concepts were in disrepute among the behaviorists, but Tolman proceeded to study them empirically using his rats and invented an experimental method for inferring cognitions, expectancies, and purposes in both animals and men from observable behavior. The result was that these concepts (despite their official banishment from psychology, first by Watson and then by Hull) continued to remain respect-
98
TONNIES, FERDINAND
able among a respectable number of respectable experimental psychologists. Tolman's work took on new import in the late 1950s and early 1960s with the revival of interest in cognition by many experimental and physiological psychologists. Many of these latter-day cognitive psychologists found in Tolman's "expectancies," "cognitive maps," "hypotheses," and so on, the very concepts they needed. And so it appears that the greatest Tolmanian paradox of all may be in the making. Tolman's system, which because of its lack of mathematical statement and quantification was so critically attacked by all other system makers, may become the system of choice for the game theorists, decision theorists, and information theorists in their mathematical model-building—precisely when the relicts of the more orthodox behavioristic systems have become disillusioned with curve fitting, "hypothetico-deductive" predictions, and even (if Skinner is to be taken at his word) with simple statistical analysis of data. DAVID KRECH [For the historical context of Tolman's work, see GESTALT THEORY; and the biographies of BRUNSWIK; HOLT; HULL; KOFFKA; LEWIS; McDoUGALL; TlTCH-
ENER; WATSON; WUNDT; YERKES. For discussion of the subsequent development of his ideas, see LEARNING; MOTIVATION, especially the article on HUMAN MOTIVATION; THINKING, article On COGNITIVE ORGANIZATION AND PROCESSES.] WORKS BY TOLMAN
(1922) 1951 A New Formula for Behaviorism. Pages 1-8 in Edward C. Tolman, Collected Papers in Psychology. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press. (1932) 1951 Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men. Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press. -» Tolman's major work, containing a wealth of empirical data from his Berkeley laboratory and his first full-dress systematic presentation of purposive behaviorism. 1942 Drives Toward War. New York: Appleton. -> Tolman's Quaker background and his concern with the problem of peace found expression during World War ii in this book. Here he examined the motives which send men to war and then suggested the kinds of social controls that a warless society would have to impose on these motives. 1949 There Is More Than One Kind of Learning. Psychological Review 56:144-155. 1952 Edward C. Tolman. Volume 4, pages 323-339 in A History of Psychology in Autobiography. Worcester, Mass.: Clark Univ. Press. 1959 Principles of Purposive Behavior. Volume 2, pages 92-157 in Sigmund Koch (editor), Psychology: A Study of a Science. New York: McGraw-Hill. Collected Papers in Psychology. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1951. H» A collection of 19 of Tolman's papers together with an evaluative foreword published by his colleagues and former students to commemorate his more than thirty years of service at the
University of California. Tolman himself chose the papers as those which to him meant steps in the development of his theoretical system. The 1922 paper referred to in the present article is the first paper in this collection. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
CRUTCHFIELD, RICHARD S.; KRECH, D.; and TRYON, R. C. 1960 Edward Chace Tolman: A Life of Scientific and Social Purpose. Science 131:714-716. -» A brief biographical and appreciative note by three of Tolman's former students and later colleagues at Berkeley. [Editorial.] 1959 Washington Post November 25, p. A18, col. 1. LEYTHAM, G. W. H. 1962 In Memory of Edward Chace Tolman (1886-1959). British Psychological Society, Bulletin 49:21-28. RITCHIE, BENBOW F. 1964 Edward Chace Tolman. Volume 37, pages 293-324 in National Academy of Sciences, Biographical Memoirs. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. -»• Contains a list of Tolman's "Honors and Distinctions," as well as a 99-item bibliography of his published papers and books.
TONNIES, FERDINAND Ferdinand Tonnies (1855-1936), German sociologist, spent his childhood on a prosperous farm in Schleswig-Holstein and, after his father's retirement, in the town of Husum. In 1872 Tonnies enrolled with patriotic enthusiasm at the University of Strassburg, but making use of the German student's freedom to move, he transferred successively to the universities of Jena, Bonn, Leipzig, and Tubingen, where he finally received his doctorate in classical philology in 1877. Even then his interests had shifted to political philosophy and social problems. His father's means, which later made it possible for him to devote his time to private scholarship, later enabled him to pursue postdoctoral studies. Tonnies went to the University of Berlin and to London, beginning his Hobbesian studies and Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. In 1881 a draft of the latter served as his Habilitationsschrift when Tonnies became a Privatdozent for philosophy at the University of Kiel. He made but little use of the venia legendi (license to lecture). Relatively unencumbered by academic duties, Tonnies contributed extensively not only to professional journals but to political periodicals as well, commenting on the important problems of his time and often taking sides on political issues. Despite his detachment from the university, he was appointed to a chair for economics and statistics in 1913, from which post he retired in 1916. He had lived outside Kiel during most of his academic life, but in 1921 he moved into the city and resumed teaching as professor emeritus in the field of sociology.
TONNIES, FERDINAND Tonnies was president of the German Sociological Society from 1909 to 1933; it had been founded by him together with Georg Simmel, Werner Sombart, and Max Weber. He also participated in the organization of the Hobbes and Spinoza societies and was active in the Society for Ethical Culture. Although he lived all his adult life in the region where he was born, Tonnies liked to travel and felt quite at home in England, where his studies and publications gained him many friends. He visited the United States in 1904, at which time he read a paper at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. He was a corresponding member of the American Sociological Society. Conservative by temperament, Tonnies nevertheless took an active interest in the socialist and trade union movements, in consumer cooperatives, and in a variety of other progressive movements. He supported the independence movements in Finland and Ireland. In spite of his opposition to the imperial regime, he endeavored to defend Germany's cause in World War i and after the war investigated the "war guilt question." In protest against the rising National Socialist movement, he joined the Social Democratic party. This and his public denunciation of Nazism and anti-Semitism in the winter of 1932/1933 led to his illegal discharge by the Hitler government from his position as professor emeritus. He died in 1936, nearly 81 years old. Tonnies' mother came from a family of Lutheran pastors, and although he himself was an agnostic, he never ceased to concern himself with problems of religion. In his old age he came to believe in the possibility of an adogmatic universal religion that would unite all mankind. All his life he had a great love of poetry, and many of his own writings reveal a poetic vein. System of sociology Although Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887) established Tonnies' reputation, his system of sociology is better studied in his later works, particularly those published after 1925. At this mature stage of his work Tonnies distinguished between a broad and a narrow concept of sociology. The former included social biology, demography, and social psychology, while the latter included only the study of social relationships, groups, norms, and values. Within the narrower field, Tonnies established three methodologically distinct divisions or levels of inquiry: (1) Theoretical or pure sociology as an integrated system of basic concepts. (2) Applied sociology, a deductive discipline that
99
uses the concepts of theoretical sociology in order to understand and explain the origin and development of society, in particular modern society. (3) Empirical sociology or sociography, the latter term coined by Rudolf Steinmetz (1935), which was never clearly defined by Tonnies but which corresponds roughly to what is called sociological research in the United States. It was, of course, quite clear to Tonnies that these conceptual distinctions cannot be maintained in the study of concrete social phenomena. Empirical sociological research must be oriented toward a general theory of social interaction, and the physical existence and psychological interaction of men must be given recognition. Social entities. Tonnies perceived all social interactions and groups as creations of human thought and will. These creations he called social entities (soziale Wesenheiten), and he classified them roughly as social collectives (Samischaften), social corporations (soziale Korperschaften), and social relationships (soziale Verhdltnisse). The concept of Samtschaft occurs only in Tonnies' later writings and refers to those unorganized groups that are large enough to be independent of the participation of specific individuals, for example, social classes or the nation. The concept of social corporation is derived from the legal concept of persona iuris and refers to groups that are able to act through representative organs (officers). Social relationships may have their basis in biological or psychological relationships, or in both (as in the case of the relationship between parent and child), but as social relationships in the strict sense of the concept they exist because, and insofar as, they are recognized, acknowledged, and willed by the participants and, normally, also by outsiders (see Tonnies' preface to the 6th and 7th editions of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft). Social relationships in this sense involve the awareness of certain obligations and claims that are regulated by social norms or rules of conduct. They occur, of course, within social corporations and social collectives. The biological, psychological, and social levels of these relationships are independent: it is possible, for example, for a parent to disown his child or for a marriage to be maintained even though the psychological relationship between the spouses has become essentially hostile. The identification of social entities with willed relationships distinguishes Tonnies' concept of the social from that of behaviorism, which attributes to any kind of human interaction the quality of being social. According to Tonnies, a social entity is a creation of the will of its members, which has
100
TONNIES, FERDINAND
for them a quasi-objective reality, imposes upon them certain obligations, and grants them certain rights. These characteristics are most evident in social corporations, but they exist also in simple social relationships. The will to maintain a particular social relationship as a social entity is manifest when the participants conform to the specific rules of conduct valid for that relationship. "Wesenwille" and "Kiirwille." The will that establishes a social entity may be differentiated according to its relation to ends and means. The meaning of "will" is much broader here than in popular usage. An action may be willed for its own sake, or because of a hardly conscious drive or inclination, or out of habit, or it may be consciously motivated on account of its intrinsic moral, aesthetic, or other value; or a course of action may be willed in order to achieve a certain end or purpose, regardless of its intrinsic value. Tonnies called the first type of will Wesenwille (natural will), because it is a manifestation of the actor's nature; the second type of will he called Kiirwille, a term derived from an ancient Germanic word for choosing, because the actor chooses among various possible means to an end. The translation of Kiirwille as "rational will" should not be interpreted to imply that only Kiirwille is rational while Wesenwille is not. Tonnies conceived of Wesenwille as having degrees of rationality, which correspond, as he acknowledged, to Max Weber's affectual, traditional, and value-rational orientations of social action; Kiirwille, in turn, corresponds to Weber's purposive-rational orientation of social action. "Gemeinschaft" and "Gesellschaft." In applying the concept of two types of will to social entities, Tonnies arrived at the fundamental distinction between entities that are the objects of Wesenwille and those that are the objects of Kiirwille. Certain entities, for example, social clubs or religious sects, result from mutual sympathy, habit, or common beliefs and are willed for their intrinsic value; other entities, for example, most business associations, are intended by their constituents to be means to specific ends. Gemeinschaft is the type of social entity that results from Wesenwille, while Gesellschaft results from Kiirwille. The German words have their English near-equivalents in the words "community" and "society"; these English terms have become accepted as interchangeable with the German ones. Tonnies developed the concepts of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft by elaborate analyses of their empirical prototypes: kinship, neighborhood, town, and spiritual community are prototypes of the former; contractual relationships, collectives based on common interests, and special purpose associations
are prototypes of the latter. The concepts themselves are intended as ideal types and not as categories of classification. Empirically, pure Gemeinschaft is impossible, because all Gemeinschaften have rational aspects; likewise, pure Gesellschaft is impossible, because man's social conduct can never be entirely determined by intellect and reason. Any concrete social entity, therefore, is only more or less Gemeinschaft-like or more or less Gesellschaftlike. It would defeat the very purpose of Tonnies' theory were one to define, for example, the family as a Gemeinschaft, instead of inquiring to what extent a given family or, on a higher level of abstraction, a given type of family approximates the ideal type of Gemeinschaft and to what extent it contains traits of Gesellschaft. Tonnies himself compared the two concepts to chemical elements that may be found combined in different proportions. What distinguishes Tonnies' theory from similar conceptual dichotomies, then, is his voluntaristic conception of all social relationships. Accordingly, Gemeinschaft-l\ke social entities may be formed by conscious acts of association, as in the case of betrothals or religious orders, and a Gesellschaftlike small group, one that meets for professional discussion or to play chess, may have less formal organization than a Gemeinschaft-like corporate group, such as a village community. Tonnies identified Gemeinschaft-like relationships of equality (Genossenschaft) and of superordination-subordination (Herrschaft), as well as mixed cases; for example, the authority of the father over his children, of the master over his servant, and the rule of elders in a community are prototypes of Gemeinschaft-like authority relationships, while the relationship of husband and wife represents a combination of equality and superordination. In Gesellschaften, the individual members are conceptually peers, although in fact they may delegate authority to some persons; for example, the members of an association delegate authority to an executive committee. In both types of entity the abuse of authority may transform an originally friendly relationship into a more or less hostile one, and in the extreme case may result in the complete dissolution of social bonds in the strict sense of the term. Social norms. Tonnies conceived of every social entity as endowed with a collective will. Such a collective will is most readily evident in social corporations, but it exists in principle in all other collectives and relationships. The collective will aims at the realization and preservation of social values and becomes manifest in the rules of conduct or social norms which the associated individ-
TONNIES, FERDINAND
1 01
uals regard as binding. Tonnies distinguished three levels of norms and on each level, in turn, norms of Gemeinschaft-like and Gesellschaft-like character. The resulting scheme, which is very complex, can be reduced to a series of antitheses: custom and convention; customary law and statute law; religiously sanctioned ethics and rational ethics sanctioned by public opinion. Tonnies dealt with custom in many of its ramifications in his important work Die Sitte (1909a). The word "custom" designates (1) actual patterns of behavior; (2) a complex of prescriptive or prohibitive rules of conduct; and (3) a will, this last being, according to Tonnies, the least noticed and yet the most interesting meaning, clearly implied when we say "custom requires that. . . ." Tonnies considered it his particular achievement to have noted this third meaning. Custom in this sense signifies one kind of common will of a social entity. In his second major work, Kritik der offentlichen Meinung (1922&), the meanings of the term "public opinion" are differentiated in an analogous way. Opinions are not merely statements of thoughts, they contain an element of will. This is especially evident in the case of opinions on social and political issues: the expression of such opinions involves the claim that others should accept them as directives for social action. The normative character of opinions is even more obvious when they are held by certain publics, as distinct from individuals. Tonnies further distinguished from the opinions of limited publics the public opinion of a total society, that is, the opinion concerning public affairs that claims to be the only true and correct opinion. This latter he considered to be a kind of group will, because anyone who does not share this public opinion, or opposes it openly, is likely to be regarded as disloyal. There may be different degrees of firmness of any public opinion; on fundamental principles, public opinion tends to be much firmer and more persistent than on current issues.
philosophy of history was, however, presented in numerous articles, some of which were collected in Fortschritt und soziale Entwicklung (1926). He saw the transition from a predominantly Gemeinschaft-like to a predominantly Gesellschaft-like social order primarily as a consequence of increasing commercialization together with the rise of the modern state and the progress of science. The transition is therefore the work of three types of kiirwillig-oriented men: the economic, the political, and the scientific. Empirical sociology or sociography. Tonnies' empirical studies are concerned mainly with phenomena of social pathology (suicide, crime, illegitimacy), but he also studied population problems and the impact of business cycles and seasonal cycles on social conditions and social change (Oberschall 1965). Tonnies was motivated to make these studies both by humanitarian and ethical considerations and by a sociological interest in the effect of Gemeinschaft-like or Gesellschaftlike social environments on different types of deviant behavior. At an early stage in his career he began to see that it was necessary to give sociological theory an empirical foundation, not only through historical studies but more particularly through "mass observation" and statistical analysis. In his empirical studies he invented an entirely original method of correlation (see Tonnies 1909Z?; 1924; Striefler 1931). His recently published letters to his friend the philosopher Friedrich Paulsen (see Tonnies-Paulsen: Briefwechsel} contain evidence that his "almost passionate interest in statistics" and his plans for what he called studies in "physique sociale oder Soziologie [sic]," "on the basis of statistics," even antedate the first steps in the conception of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. As early as 1895 he stated that certain types of crime were increasing with the decline of Gemeinschaft and with the increasing predominance of Gesellschaft-like conditions.
Applied sociology The theory of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft was originally intended as the conceptual framework for a historical analysis of the evolution of modern society. The first edition of the book carries the subtitle Abhandlung des Communismus und des Sozialismus als empirische Kulturformen, indicating that Tonnies intended to trace social evolution from primitive agrarian communism through the individualistic society of modern capitalism to an ultimate socialistic order, which he viewed as Gemeinschaft of a higher order. Only fragments of this historical treatise were published under the title Geist der Neuzeit (1935). Tonnies'
Contributions and influence Tonnies' concept of Wesenwille was derived from Arthur Schopenhauer and Wilhelm Wundt; his concept of Kurwille stemmed from Thomas Hobbes and the rationalist doctrine of natural law. Other important influences came from Adam Ferguson (the idea that sympathy is the basis of human society, and that alienation is a concomitant of "commercial" society), from John Millar (the basic types of authority), and from Lorenz von Stein, Marx, J. J. Bachofen, Emile de Laveleye, L. H. Morgan, Sir Henry Maine, Otto von Gierke, Rudolf von Jhering, and Adolf Wagner. The originality of Tonnies' doctrine of the differ-
102
TONNIES, FERDINAND
ent types of social entities lies in its synthesis of the social theories of rationalism with those of the romantic and historical schools. His theory overcomes the antagonism between the organicist and the contractual conceptions of society. According to Tonnies, these apparently irreconcilable views of human society correspond to real historical phenomena, and some of the greatest political theorists of the past have abstracted models from this reality: the model of the organic society is Aristotle's polis, while the model of the contractual society is Hobbes's "political commonwealth." The voluntaristic basis on which Tonnies reconciled the two traditions in social theory enabled him to state the old problem of the relationship of the individual to society in a new way and to propose a solution for it: some social relationships may be assumed to exist prior to individuals (and are actually so imagined), while other relationships may be assumed to be the result of an agreement among previously independent individuals. The individual is always conceived of as a social being, and, correspondingly, social entities are conceived of as the creations of willing and acting individuals. Epistemologically, Tonnies anticipated Georg Simmel's idea of pure sociology as a systematic theory of the "forms" of social relationships. He also foreshadowed the phenomenological method later developed by Alfred Vierkandt (see Salomon 1936). Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft makes great demands on the reader's erudition, especially on his familiarity with social and economic history, with political and social philosophy of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, and with nineteenth-century anthropological literature. Tonnies' style and his habit of shifting from conceptual thinking to empirical analysis constitute additional difficulties and sources of misinterpretation. For nearly thirty years, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft was hardly known outside of a small public of scholars; a change came after World War i, when a new generation, disillusioned with the existing social order and longing for Gemeinschaft, turned to the book with enthusiasm. Tonnies did not share the pessimism of Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West, with its value-laden distinction between culture and civilization. He saw hopefully into the future, visualizing a socialist order that would have the attributes of Gemeinschaft and that would be based upon rational ethics and possibly on a world-wide political order. Tonnies' influence on the social sciences, although long delayed, is now so widespread and so much taken for granted that it is difficult to ap-
praise (Freyer 1936). For example, the concept of "mass society" with its emphasis on alienation owes a great deal to Tonnies. Rural sociologists, who at first uncritically equated rural life with Gemeinschaft, have since refined their application of Tonnies' theory in rural community studies (see Heberle 1941; Loomis & Beegle 1950; Wurzbacher 1955; Hofstee 1960). Finally, Tonnies' theory has had a strong and far-reaching influence because it is derived from certain universal experiences of social life. Fundamental contrasts in human relations that we sense more or less clearly are brought into focus by his concepts of sociopsychological types. These types are then employed to achieve a deeper understanding of contrasts in the structure of social systems. By providing a systematization of the basic phenomena of social life, Tonnies laid the foundation for a new kind of sociology that subsequently was further developed by such scholars as Durkheim, Simmel, Weber, and Maclver. RUDOLF HEBERLE [For the historical context of Tonnies' work, see SOCIOLOGY, article on THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIOLOGICAL THOUGHT; and the biographies of BACHOFEN; FERGUSON; GIERKE; HOBBES; MAINE; MILLAR; MORGAN, LEWIS HENRY; STEIN; WAGNER; WUNDT; for discussion of the subsequent development of Tonnies' ideas, see AGRICULTURE, article on SOCIAL ORGANIZATION; COMMUNITY-SOCIETY CONTINUA; and the biographies of DURKHEIM; MAC!VER; REDFIELD; SIMMEL; WEBER, MAX.] WORKS BY TONNIES (1887) 1957 Community and Society (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft). Translated and edited by Charles P. Loomis. East Lansing: Michigan State Univ. Press. -> Contains a selected bibliography. First published in German. A paperback edition was published in 1963 by Harper. (1889a) 1928 TONNIES, FERDINAND (editor) Behemoth: Or, the Long Parliament, by Thomas Hobbes. Cambridge Univ. Press. -» The first edition of Behemoth was published in 1679. (1889b) 1928 TONNIES, FERDINAND (editor) The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, by Thomas Hobbes. Cambridge Univ. Press. -» The first edition of The Elements of Law was published in 1650. (1896) 1925 Thomas Hobbes Leben und Lehre. 3d enl. ed. Stuttgart: Frommann. 1899-1900 Philosophical Terminology. Mind New Series 8:289-332, 467-491; 9:46-61. 1905 The Present Problems of Social Structure. American Journal of Sociology 10:569-588. (1909a) 1961 Custom: An Essay on Social Codes. New York: Free Press. -> First published as Die Sitte. 1909& Eine neue Methode der Vergleichung statistischer Reihen. Jahrbuch fur Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung und Volkswirtschaft im Deutschen Reich 33:699-720. -» Now called Schmollers Jahrbuch.
TOOKE, THOMAS 1922a Ferdinand Tonnies. Volume 3, pages 199-234 in Raymond Schmidt (editor), Die Philosophic der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen. Leipzig: Meiner. 1922fa Kritik der offentlichen Meinung. Berlin: Springer. 1923 Zweck und Mittel im sozialen Leben. Volume 1, pages 235-270 in Erinnerungsgabe fur Max Weber. 2 vols. in 1. Edited by Melchior Palyi. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. 1924 Korrelation der Parteien in Statistik der Kieler Reichstagswahlen. Jahrbucher fur N ationalokonomie und Statistik 122:663-672. 1925-1929 Soziologische Studien und Kritiken. 3 vols. Jena: Fischer. 1926 Fortschritt und soziale Entwicklung: Geschichtsphilosophische Ansichten. Karlsruhe: Braun. -» The second article in this collection was published as "The Concept and Law of Human Progress," in Social Forces, 1940, Volume 19, pages 23-29. (1931a) 1965 Einfiihrung in die Soziologie. Reprint with an introduction by Rudolf Heberle. Stuttgart: Enke. (1931k) 1966 Estates and Classes. Pages 12-21 in Reinhard Bendix and Seymour M. Lipset (editors), Class, Status, and Power: Social Stratification in Comparative Perspective. 2d ed. New York: Free Press. -> First published as "Stande und Klassen" in the Handworterbuch der Soziologie. 1932 Mein Verhaltnis zur Soziologie. Pages 103-122 in Richard Thurnwald (editor), Soziologie von heute. Leipzig: Hirschfeld. 1935 Geist der Neuzeit. Leipzig: Buske. Ferdinand Tonnies—Friedrich Paulsen: Briefwechsel, 18761908. Edited by Olaf Klose, E. G. Jacoby, and I. Fischer, with an introduction by E. G. Jacoby. Veroffentlichungen der Schleswig-Holsteinischen Universitatsgesellschaft, New Series, No. 27. Kiel: Hirt, 1961. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
BRENKE, ELSE 1936 Verzeichnis der Schriften von Ferdinand Tonnies aus den Jahren 1875 bis 1935. Pages 383-403 in Reine und angewandte Soziologie: Eine Festgabe fur Ferdinand Tonnies zu seinem achtzigsten Geburtstage am 26. Juli 1935. Leipzig: Buske. -» An almost complete chronological list of Tonnies' works. Festgabe Zum siebzigsten Geburtstage von Ferdinand Tonnies. 1925 Kolner Vierteljahrshefte fiir Soziologie 5, no. 1 & 2:1-496. FREYER, HANS 1936 Ferdinand Tonnies und seine Stellung in der deutschen Soziologie. Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv 44:1-9. HEBERLE, RUDOLF (1937)1948 The Sociological System of Ferdinand Tonnies: "Community" and "Society." Pages 227-248 in Harry E. Barnes (editor), An Introduction to the History of Sociology. Univ. of Chicago Press. -» This is a revised and expanded reprint of an article that was first published in Volume 2 of the American Sociological Review. HEBERLE, RUDOLF 1941 The Application of Fundamental Concepts in Rural Community Studies. Rural Sociology 6:203-215. HEBERLE, RUDOLF 1955 Ferdinand Tonnies' Contributions to the Sociology of Political Parties. American Journal of Sociology 61:213-220. HEBERLE, RUDOLF 1959 Ferdinand Tonnies. Volume 10, pages 394-397 in Handworterbuch der Sozialwissenschaften. Stuttgart: Fischer. -»• Contains a bibliography of works by and works about Tonnies.
703
HOFSTEE, E. W. 1960 Rural Social Organization. Sociologia ruralis 1:105-117. JACOBY, E. G. 1955 Ferdinand Tonnies, Sociologist: A Centennial Tribute. Kyklos 8:144-159. LEEMANS, VICTOR 1933 F. Tonnies et la sociologie contemporaine en Allemagne. Paris: Alcan. LEIF, JOSEPH 1946 Les categories fondamentales de la sociologie de Tonnies. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. LOOMIS, CHARLES P.; and BEEGLE, J. ALLAN (1950) 1955 Rural Social Systems: A Textbook in Rural Sociology and Anthropology. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: PrenticeHall; London: Bailey & Swinfen. OBERSCHALL, ANTHONY 1965 Empirical Social Research in Germany, 1848-1914. Paris and The Hague: Mouton; New York: Humanities. -> See especially pages 51-63. Reine und angewandte Soziologie: Eine Festgabe fiir Ferdinand Tonnies zu seinem achtzigsten Geburtstage am 26. Juli 1935. 1936 Leipzig: Buske. SALOMON, ALBERT 1936 In Memoriam Ferdinand Tonnies (1855-1936). Soctai Research 3:348-363. STEINMETZ, SEBALD RUDOLF (1925) 1935 Wat is sociographie? Volume 3, pages 143-145 in Sebald Rudolf Steinmetz, Gesammelte kleinere Schriften zur Ethnologie und Soziologie. Groningen (Netherlands): Nordhoff. STRIEFLER, HEINRICH 1931 Zur Methode der Rangkorrelation nach Tonnies. Deutsches statistisches Zentralblatt 23:129-136; 161-168. WIRTH, Louis 1926 The Sociology of Ferdinand Tonnies. American Journal of Sociology 32:412-422. WURZBACHER, GERHARD 1955 Beobachtungen zum Anwendungsbereich der Tonniesschen Kategorien Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. Kolner Zeitschrift fiir Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie New Series 7:443462. Zum hundertsten Geburtstag von Ferdinand Tonnies. 1955 Kolner Zeitschrift fiir Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie New Series 7:337-490.
TOOKE, THOMAS Thomas Tooke (1774-1858), English merchant, economist, and historian of prices, was born in Russia, where his father was a clergyman of the English church in Kronstadt and later chaplain of the English factory in St. Petersburg. He was for many years in the Russian trade as a partner in Stephen Thornton Brothers Co. and later in Asteel, Tooke, & Thornton. After retirement from active business in 1836, he served for over a decade as governor of the Royal Exchange Assurance Corporation and as chairman of the St. Katherine's Dock Company. Tooke began to participate in discussions of economic policy in 1819, when he was a witness before the Commons and Lords committees considering the resumption of cash payments. In 1820 he gave evidence in favor of free trade before the
104
TOOKE, THOMAS
Lords committee and in 1821 before a similar Commons committee. Tooke made few contributions to the theory of international trade, but throughout his life he was an effective spokesman, in the business community and among men in public life, for the removal of trade barriers. He was the author of the London Merchants' Petition of 1820 in support of free trade, which was presented to the House of Commons by Alexander Baring. Largely in association with others who had been instrumental in the Merchants' Petition, he was a leader in founding the Political Economy Club in 1821 and was a member until his death. Important as Tooke's contemporary influence on behalf of free trade was, his permanent place in the history of economics rests primarily on his role in the British monetary and banking controversy and on his collection of price statistics. Testifying in 1819 before the parliamentary committees on the resumption of cash payments, Tooke had taken a view close to that of Ricardo—not only supporting the re-establishment of the gold standard but accepting a basically monetary explanation of price changes. In 1821 Tooke again gave evidence, this time before the Commons committee on the depressed state of agriculture, largely on the relation of monetary policy to agricultural prices. Although he never wavered in his defense of the gold standard, his study of prices led him gradually to the view that bank-created money is a result and not a cause of price changes. His first book, Thoughts and Details on the High and Low Prices of the Thirty Years, From 1793-1822 (1823), emphasized the influence of climatic conditions and changing demand on agricultural prices. Later publications, including the first two volumes of his History of Prices, which appeared in 1838 and incorporated most of his 1823 book, increasingly stressed the influences affecting individual prices but did not explicitly repudiate his earlier monetary explanation of price changes. In his extensive testimony before the Bank Charter Committee of 1832, Tooke's position shifted substantially from that of his testimony of 1819; but only when he appeared before the Select Committee on Banks of Issue of 1840 did he finally reject the idea that monetary changes induced by bank credit influence prices—an idea that was the basis of the Currency Principle, namely, that Bank of England notes should be made to fluctuate exactly as would a metallic currency. Indeed, Tooke became the leading advocate for the opposing view commonly known as the Banking Principle, namely, that note issue needs no rigid control. In the policy controversy of the time Tooke's opposition to the Currency Prin-
ciple concentrated on the monetary significance of deposits. But his argument had the wider implications that monetary policy is powerless to influence prices or economic conditions and that the Bank of England should not be subject to any rules other than the good judgment of its management. Before the passage of the Bank Act of 1844, Tooke urged these views in An Inquiry Into the Currency Principle (1844) and, after its passage, in testimony in 1848 before the parliamentary Secret Committees on the Commercial Distress that followed the suspension in 1847 of the Bank Act and in On the Bank Charter Act of 1844 (1856). The third and fourth volumes of his History of Prices, appearing in 1840 and 1848, incorporated, in addition to new statistics, much of his earlier writing and testimony. The fifth and sixth volumes, brought out in 1857 with William Newmarch as coauthor, added material on developments after the Californian and Australian gold discoveries but always within the same theoretical assumption—that the money supply is the consequence rather than the cause of economic changes. Tooke was an avid collector of figures, a persuasive polemical writer against the more mechanical concepts of the "currency school," and a discriminating and forceful critic of Bank of England actions in particular situations, but he had little ability to develop an organized monetary theory. Although he favored a discretionary rather than a rules approach to monetary policy, it would be easy, in the light of monetary controversy since 1930, to read modern interpretations into Tooke's views. The discretion that he favored was always within the limits of the gold standard. Although Tooke was critical of the idea that the Bank of England should be a lender of last resort, his insistence that the Bank keep larger reserves contributed to the forces that led in the 1870s to the adoption of the Bagehot Principle. (According to the Bagehot Principle, the Bank of England has the responsibility of holding larger reserves than do other banks so that in time of crisis it can lend freely on proper security to all who ask for credit.) Tooke and his collaborator, Newmarch, made no attempt to construct index numbers from their extensive raw data; but Stanley Jevons later used their figures in his pioneering work on price indices and described the History of Prices as "a unique work, of which we can hardly overestimate the value." Tooke was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1821. In 1833 he was appointed to the Royal Commission on the Employment of Children and in 1840 to a similar commission, and he played a prominent part in the work of both. The Tooke
TORRENS, ROBERT
705
the proprietor of The Globe, a newspaper, nor as the instigator of the development of New South Wales (although we still have Lake Torrens) that he deserves a place in this encyclopedia. Torrens is important as a representative figure of the Ricardian era of English political economy. [For discussion of the subsequent development of Tooke's ideas, see MONEY; PRICES; and the biogIt is important to note that Torrens was born in raphy of BAGEHOT, particularly the article on ECOIreland, for the economic and social (including NOMIC CONTRIBUTIONS.] religious) problems of that country clearly dominated much of his thinking, especially with regard WORKS BY TOOKE to the causes and cures of poverty. (1823) 1824 Thoughts and Details on the High and Low Torrens was not of the same intellectual caliber as Prices of the Thirty Years, From 1793-1822. 2d ed. London: Murray. Ricardo or Senior, but he was unquestionably a cut 1826 Considerations on the State of Currency. London: above James Mill and McCulloch; and in monetary Murray. matters he ranks with the best economists of his 1829a A Letter to Lord Grenville, on the Effects Ascribed generation. However, after his death, his contributo the Resumption of Cash Payments on the Value of the Currency. London: Murray. tions were forgotten; here we must agree with 1829£> On the Currency in Connexion With the Corn Lionel Robbins' view: "There can be no rewriting Trade, And on the Corn Laws; to Which is Added, a the verdict that any direct influence that Torrens Postscript on the Present Commercial Stagnation. may have had, ceased almost altogether with his London: Murray. (1838-1857) 1928 TOOKE, THOMAS; and NEWMARCH, death; even in regard to the theory of tariffs and WILLIAM A History of Prices and the State of the the terms of trade, in some respects his most imCirculation From 1792 to 1856. 6 vols. London: King. portant theoretical construction, the main influence -> First published as A History of Prices and the State came from Mill rather than Torrens" (Robbins of the Circulation, From 1793 to 1837: Preceded by a 1958, p. 232). Brief Sketch of the State of the Corn Trade in the Last-Two Centuries. Value, production, and distribution. Torrens (1844) 1959 An Inquiry Into the Currency Principle: sided with Lauderdale and Samuel Bailey in arguThe Connection of the Currency With Prices, and the ing that it is useless to search for an absolute measExpediency of a Separation of Issue From Banking. ure of value, and he also objected to the simple 2d ed. London School of Economics and Political Science. labor theory of value as outlined in Chapter 1 of 1856 On the Bank Charter Act of 1844, Its Principles Ricardo's Principles. But undoubtedly his most and Operation, With Suggestions for an Improved original work in the sphere of price theory is found Administration of the Bank of England. London: in his analysis of the gains from trade. In The Longmans. Economist Refuted (1808) he came close to the SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY principle of comparative advantage, and in his EsGREGORY, THEODOR E. G. (1928) 1962 An Introduction say on the External Corn Trade (1815) the distincto Tooke and Newmarch's A History of Prices and of tion between absolute and comparative advantage the State of the Circulation From 1792 to 1856. Lonis unambiguous. Seligman, in his famous article don School of Economics and Political Science. "On Some Neglected British Economists" (1903), claimed for Torrens the discovery of comparative advantage; he certainly published the principle beTORRENS, ROBERT fore Ricardo did in his Principles of 1817. Robert Torrens (1780-1864), in a life span of Theory of colonization. Like his contemporaries, 84 years, encompassed successfully the occupations Torrens rejected the earlier view that colonies of professional soldier, newspaper proprietor, memwere of no economic value. He regarded colonizaber of Parliament, and promoter of schemes for the tion as basically a method of overcoming the probcolonization of Australia. He was also a founding lem of overpopulation, his particular concern being member of the Political Economy Club and took the the effect of Irish immigration to Great Britain. chair at its inaugural meeting. These activities Like Wakefield, he thought that giving free land to apart, he maintained throughout his career, begincolonial immigrants was fraught with danger, and ning in the early 1800s and ending in the late he advocated a system akin to Wakefield's "suf1850s, a vast literary output ranging from political ficient price" system to enable immigrant laborers tracts to economic treatises, and he even managed to have sufficient capital stock to enter the ranks to write two delightfully naive novels. of the independent cultivators, and so prevent the It is not, however, as the hero of Anhalt, nor as overdispersion of the labor force. professorship of economic science and statistics at the University of London was established in his honor. FRANK W. FETTER
1 06
TOTALITARIANISM
Commercial policy. In the field of commercial policy theory, Torrens is widely known—through the efforts of Jacob Viner—for his modification of the doctrine that a regime of free international trade is necessarily optimally advantageous for individual countries. He was among the first to point to the possibility that a country might alter the terms of trade in its favor by use of an import tariff. In a series of letters, reprinted as The Budget (1841-1842), he enunciated the theory of reciprocity; the climax of his exposition is to be found in Letter n, addressed to Lord John Russell. There he argued that if some countries had tariffs, unilateral free trade was a mistaken policy, and that in such circumstances reciprocal tariffs should be adopted. This modification of the orthodox free trade position brought charges that he was abandoning the central classical position entirely. He himself believed, however, that he was only applying the logic of the Ricardian position. Theory of money and banking. As an economist Torrens was probably best known to the public as a leader of the currency school, and he could justly claim to be one of the initiators of the scheme, made law in the Bank Charter Act of 1844, that separated the issue and the banking departments of the Bank of England. He also wrote a classic defense of that bizarre piece of legislative enactment, The Principles and Practical Operation of Sir Robert Peel's Bill of 1844 (1848). There is an unexplained break in Torrens' development as a monetary controversialist that has intrigued and worried students of his work. Torrens began his monetary writing as an extreme antibullionist: his 1812 Essay on Money and Paper Currency had a strong inflationist ring about it and emphasized vividly the virtues of a paper currency. However, he later appeared to make a complete about-face and to end his career as defender of the currency school. This contradiction has been partly resolved by the recent discovery by D. P. O'Brien of an unpublished paper written by Torrens in 1826 entitled "On the Means of Establishing a Cheap, Secure and Uniform Currency" (1826). Here Torrens outlined a modification of Ricardo's plan for a gold exchange standard, hoping thereby to achieve the elasticity of currency that he had hankered for as an antibullionist and avoid the dangers of excess that (presumably) had forced him into the bullionist camp. BERNARD CORRY [For the historical context of Torrens' work, see the biographies of LAUDERDALE; RICARDO; SENIOR; WAKEFIELD; for discussion of the subsequent devel-
opment of his ideas, see BANKING, CENTRAL; COLONIALISM; INTERNATIONAL TRADE CONTROLS, article On TARIFFS AND PROTECTIONISM.] WORKS BY TORRENS
(1808) 1858 The Economist Refuted. London: Longmans. 1812 An Essay on Money and Paper Currency. London: Johnson. (1815) 1829 An Essay on the External Corn Trade. 5th ed. London: Longmans. 1821 An Essay on the Production of Wealth, With an Appendix, in Which the Principles of Political Economy Are Applied to the Actual Circumstances of This Country. London: Longmans. (1826) 1965 On the Means of Establishing a Cheap, Secure and Uniform Currency. Economica New Series 32:286-301. -» Written in 1826; published posthumously. (1833) 1958 Letters on Commercial Policy. London School of Economics and Political Science, Series of Reprints of Scarce Works on Political Economy, No. 14. London School of Economics and Political Science. (1835) 1836 Colonization of South Australia. 2d ed. London: Longmans. 1841-1842 The Budget: A Series of Letters on Financial, Commercial, and Colonial Policy. London: Smith. (1848) 1858 The Principles and Practical Operation of Sir Robert Peel's Bill of 1844, Explained and Defended. 3d ed. London: Longmans. WORKS ABOUT TORRENS
FETTER, FRANK W. 1962 Robert Torrens: Colonel of Marines and Political Economist. Economica New Series 29:152-165. MENAI, S. A. 1956 Robert Torrens: 1780-1864. Economica New Series 23:49-61. O'BRIEN, D. P. 1965 The Transition in Torrens' Monetary Thought. Economica New Series 32:269-286. ROBBINS, LIONEL 1958 Robert Torrens and the Evolution of Classical Economics. New York: St. Martins; London: Macmillan. SELIGMAN, EDWIN R. A. 1903 On Some Neglected British Economists. 2 parts. Economic Journal 13:335— 363, 511-535.
TOTALITARIANISM Totalitarianism is a twentieth-century term that did not come into general or academic use until the late 1930s because the political phenomena meant to be described by it had not attracted specific attention until then. The Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (1930-1935), for instance, has no entry entitled "totalitarianism." The first citation of the word "totalitarian" by the Oxford English Dictionary (Supplement) of 1933 comes from the Contemporary Review of April 1928: "Fascism renounces its function as a totalitarian regime, and enters the electoral field on equal footing with its adversaries." The Times (London) followed suit in November 1929: "A reaction against parliamentarism . . . in favor of a 'totalitarian' or unitary
TOTALITARIANISM state, whether Fascist or Communist." These first two occurrences recorded in the dictionary point to the association, still often made today, between totalitarianism, fascism and communism, and rule by a single party. Problems of definition The novelty of the term lends support to those students of the subject who regard totalitarianism as a unique creation of the twentieth century, without historical precedent. Friedrich, for example, defines totalitarianism as a "syndrome" of six mutually related clusters of characteristic features: a single mass party, usually led by a charismatic leader; an official ideology; party control of the economy, mass communications, and means of effective armed combat; and a system of terroristic police control. Several of these features evidently could not be developed without the instruments provided by the modern technology of communications, transportation, and armaments, for example, "a technologically conditioned near-complete monopoly of control . . . of all means of effective mass communication, such as the press, radio, motion pictures, and so on" (American Academy of Arts and Sciences 1954, p. 53). A similar monopoly of all means of effective armed combat and terroristic police control depend upon the same advanced technology. Even the official ideology of the single mass party could hardly focus on "chiliastic claims as to the 'perfect' final society of mankind" unless modern technology had let the perfection of human society appear to be feasible. From this point of view, the crucial difference between earlier forms of absolutism, tyranny, or dictatorship and contemporary totalitarianism is found in the totality of control achieved by the latter, previously unattainable, at least for large societies, without the instruments of modern technology. This definitional approach to totalitarianism as a historically unique system of government creates certain difficulties for systematic political analysis. If each of the interrelated traits must be present before a system can be labeled totalitarian, how can one classify political systems along a spectrum running from one extreme, the ideal type of totalitarianism, to the other, the ideal type of its opposite, perhaps constitutional democracy? And what could one say about developing countries that have not even begun industrialization but whose governments are accused of the widespread use of coercion and repression? A number of postcolonial regimes in the developing areas have been subject to such charges. Although they show some traits of the totalitarian syndrome, they lack the techno-
107
logical base allegedly required to facilitate total control. In fact, such regimes often claim to be using aspects of the syndrome to further technological modernization. If they are totalitarian, it is not because they are industrialized but because they want to achieve industrialization. Among recent studies, Barrington Moore's avoids the difficulties of the definitional approach in the search for totalitarian elements in preindustrial societies (1958, chapter 2). Emphasizing the coercive or repressive aspects of totalitarianism and the tendency, suggested by the root "total," to control as many human activities as possible, Moore distinguishes between centralized and decentralized, or "popular," totalitarianism. Among preindustrial examples of centralized totalitarianism, he cites the regime of the Zulu chief Shaka, the Ch'in dynasty in China, and the Maurya dynasty in India. Calvin's Geneva had elements of both centralized and popular totalitarianism. In both situations, bureaucracy, espionage and denunciation, terror, and thought control are employed in the pursuit of a single goal, such as conquest, defense against the enemy, or the prevention or promotion of social change (Moore 1958, p. 75). John H. Kautsky in part adapts these suggestions to the analysis of totalitarianism and the future of politics in the developing countries (1962, chapter 4). He conceives of totalitarianism "merely as a set of methods used, under certain circumstances, by a group or several groups in control of a government in order to retain that control" (1962, p. 91). In developing countries, he distinguishes between the totalitarianism of the aristocracy and its allies and that of the intellectuals. Totalitarian systems The most promising way to gain an understanding of totalitarianism is to compare those systems to which the term is usually applied both to one another and to their nontotalitarian opposites. Nazi Germany under Hitler and the Soviet Union under Stalin are usually regarded as prototypal totalitarian systems, to which Communist China has been added more recently. Although the term itself was first applied by Mussolini to his fascist state, his rule of Italy—in retrospect, and in comparison with its National Socialist German and Communist Russian contemporaries—is not usually described as totalitarian. Nor does the term apply to other fascist or dictatorial regimes, such as those of Horthy in Hungary, Pilsudski in Poland, Franco in Spain, Salazar in Portugal, and Peron in Argentina. Disagreement prevails about the proper classification of smaller member states of the
108
TOTALITARIANISM
Soviet bloc. Are Poland, Hungary, North Vietnam, or Cuba genuinely totalitarian on their own or merely under the direct or indirect control of the totalitarian rulers of the Soviet Union or China? The futility of this question again points to the inherent difficulties of the definitional approach. Communists themselves naturally reject the label of totalitarianism, which scholars, publicists, and propagandists of the West have tried to pin on them. But the communists do not return the charge by calling their opponents "totalitarians." Rather, they call them "capitalists," "imperialists," or "colonialists" and call their systems of government "minority dictatorships of the bourgeoisie." Since the Marxists conceive of the first postrevolutionary stage toward socialism and communism as the dictatorship of the proletariat, the communists evidently object not to dictatorship itself but to minority dictatorship, which they regard as reactionary or nonprogressive. They remain silent on the issue of totality of control. In this they resemble some non-Marxists who consider the trend toward totality of political control a common feature of all industrial societies, regardless of ideological persuasion. Distinctive features. The most distinctive features of the three major political systems of the twentieth century that have generally been considered totalitarian may be listed, in descending order of distinctiveness: (1) commitment to a single, positively formulated substantive goal— such as industrialization, racial mastery, or proletarian unity—and a concomitant lack of commitment to maintenance of procedural stability; (2) unpredictability and uncertainty, resulting from the condition of procedural flux, under which yesterday's hero is today's traitor and today's loyal behavior becomes tomorrow's subversion; (3) the large-scale use of organized violence by military and paramilitary forces and uniformed and secret police; parallel efforts (4) to bring into line or suppress organizations and associations not geared to the substantive aim of the regime and (5) to enforce universal participation in public organizations dedicated to the single goal; and (6) universalization of the goal toward the remaking of all mankind in the image of the totalitarian system itself. Operational commitment to an ideology is omitted from the list, because this also characterizes systems not generally classified as totalitarian. Many democratic socialists, for example, seem as firmly committed to their ideology as Nazis or Stalinists to theirs. The difference lies not in the commitment to but in the content of the ideologies.
All three of these ideologies changed over time, although by different processes. Similarly, adherents of many organized religions also demonstrate ideological commitment. Moreover, in the cold war repeated efforts have been made, particularly in the United States, to fashion an ideology for the "free world" with which to combat the Soviet ideology. The aim of these efforts is to marshal popular commitment to the values incorporated in the new ideology, but it is not to further the establishment of totalitarianism in the West. Ideological commitment consequently does not appear to be a distinctive feature of totalitarianism. The six apparently distinctive features will now be examined in ascending order of distinctiveness. Universalism. Universalization of the single substantive goal of the system toward the reshaping of all mankind in its image is listed as the least distinctive aspect of prototypal totalitarianism because clearly nontotalitarian regimes have at times displayed a similar orientation. Like their occasional tendency toward ideologism, this seems related to economic, cultural, and social conditions increasingly prevalent in all modern or modernizing societies. Woodrow Wilson's negative and procedural goal of "making the world safe for democracy" seemed reasonable to many people of the Western world. After World War n, both the United States and the Soviet Union, and other modern industrial states, presented the more backward societies— whose elites eagerly responded—with different models of modernization. With varying degrees of success, both the Western powers and the Soviet bloc offered economic and technical aid to the developing countries to promote this transformation. Immediately after the war, both the United States and the Soviet Union worked more directly toward the goal of reforming in their own image those countries that they ruled by military occupation. In any case, the shrinkage of distances brought about by advances in the technology of communications and transport has been leading to a reduction of substantive economic, cultural, and social differences among political systems. In awareness of this, both of the great contenders in the cold war have naturally exerted themselves toward shaping the anticipated new, more or less homogenized character of all mankind in their own image rather than in their adversary's. Forced participation. Enforced general participation in public organizations is especially marked under totalitarianism. This would be particularly obvious if voting participation were taken as the only index, since both the Soviet Union and Nazi
TOTALITARIANISM Germany came close to enforcing almost 100 per cent participation at the polls, whereas in constitutional democracies only between 40 and 80 per cent of the electorate normally vote. Apart from such formal practices as voting, however, the technology of communications has not only facilitated but made inevitable inclusion of the entire population in the political, or at least the "public," process. In principle, it makes relatively little difference whether radio and television networks and the press are operated by the state and the single party, as in the Soviet Union, by private enterprise under government regulation, as in the United States, or under some mixed arrangement, as in Great Britain. In all modern societies, the tendency is toward forcing greater individual attention to public matters and eroding the sphere of privacy, although the Soviet Union has moved further in this direction than the United States, and the United States further than the United Kingdom. Suppression of associations. The suppression of organizations not dedicated to the substantive goal of the regime manifests itself as the concomitant of the enforced political coordination (Gleichschaltung) of associations whose existence antedates the establishment of the regime. The effort to coordinate is, in turn, an aspect of enforced participation. In constitutional systems, coordination and suppression are used mainly in crises and emergencies. In Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and Communist China, they were in constant evidence—although to varying degrees depending on the persistence and relative innocuousness, in different periods, of organizations like churches. But even in the United States during the cold war, efforts have been made to enlist a wide range of organizations—from churches and charitable associations, through economic interest groups, to sports clubs—in the anticommunist struggle. Communist organizations and their fellow travelers have been subjected to legal disabilities. In wartime, coordination and suppression are carried much further, even in constitutional democracies, which then in effect become constitutional dictatorships. In such circumstances, however, suppressed organizations are usually outlawed according to established, previously and publicly known procedures. By contrast, in Nazi Germany, for example, the suppression of private associations was achieved by a variety of procedures not previously known to the public, so that their future remained permanently unpredictable to members. This difference is meant to suggest that procedural instability, discussed below, is a more distinctive feature of
109
totalitarianism than the suppression of private organizations. Violence. The widespread use of organized violence still more clearly distinguishes the systems most frequently designated as totalitarian. In the eyes of the leaders, military and police violence on a large scale is made necessary, and therefore justified, by the urgency with which they pursue the goal to whose attainment the whole system is geared. Nazi extermination camps and the liquidation of the kulaks under Stalin illustrate this point. Although the violence in the first instance is directed against classes of the internal population, like Jews or remnants of the bourgeoisie, these classes are usually identified by the regime with an external enemy. In constitutional systems in peacetime, violence has not been used by governments against segments of the domestic population on a scale anywhere approaching the cited illustrations. Even in wartime, when constitutional democracies found it necessary to set up relocation camps for population groups identified by race, nationality, or sympathy with the enemy (Japanese Americans in the United States, German refugees in the United Kingdom), due process was observed to varying degrees and few acts of brutality were recorded. Although the over-all internal use of violence is a function of totalitarian trends, this seems to be less true of the scope of police functions, which appear to be more closely connected with antecedent traditions of the polity than with the totalitarian orientation of a particular regime. Measured purely in terms of the scope of police functions, including the use of secret police and informers, France and Germany have been police states at least since the beginning of the nineteenth century, and France probably more so than Germany. But after Hitler came to power in Germany, the Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo), which had previously operated as an arm of the constitutional Prussian government, became a dreaded instrument of terror because it no longer operated according to known procedures, including a system of appeals to higher public authorities. It is, therefore, the style of police functions, rather than their scope, that distinguishes totalitarian regimes. Less distinctive of totalitarianism than the scope and style of internal violence is external violence, despite the effort to link the objects of both. In their foreign relations, totalitarian and nontotalitarian governments use similar types of force because both work with the same technological conditions and because they have generally expected to fight each other. As in the case of Western
1 10
TOTALITARIANISM
attempts to forge an ideology, it is felt that one must "fight fire with fire." It was the United States that first used the destructive power of the atomic bomb against Japanese cities. In the cold war, American and Soviet leaders have professed equal readiness to employ hydrogen bombs against each other, although neither has faced the possibility of nuclear war with as much equanimity as the Chinese Communists apparently have. The contemplation or actual use of massive violence against outside enemies tends to deaden sentiments against its internal application. When millions, including one's fellow citizens, are being slaughtered or kept in foreign prison camps during war, the liquidation or imprisonment in concentration camps of whole sectors of one's own society loses some of its monstrousness. When the extermination of hundreds of millions or, indeed, the total end to human life as the result of a nuclear holocaust becomes a realistic possibility, and when government planners think in terms of preserving in shelters the persons most valuable for the eventual regeneration of society after such a catastrophe, the use of total internal violence can be accepted more easily than was the case perhaps even during World War n. Thus, there seems to be a clear relation between the quality and quantity of international violence and prevailing trends toward totalitarianism. Since both totalitarian and nontotalitarian systems exist in the same international environment of potential massive violence, with its ramifications for internal politics, the use of organized violence on a wide scale is listed as a feature less distinctive of totalitarianism than unpredictability resulting from procedural instability. Unpredictability. Unpredictability and uncertainty was the rule of life for ordinary men and for both high and low members of the dominant party under Hitler and Stalin. Although Hitler never bothered to abrogate or replace the Weimar constitution, under which he came into office as chancellor, an enabling act passed by the Reichstag in March 1933 made it possible for him, under color of legality, to amend the constitution by decree to the point of its utter transformation. Hitler himself became supreme lawgiver (oberster Rechtsherr); his will was "law," and his mind provided such constitutional provisions as Germany had under his rule. Whenever he changed his mind, he could also have changed not only the personnel but the most basic institutions of party and state. And although Stalin, in 1936, elaborately provided the Soviet Union with the constitution named after him, he never allowed it to become the framework of political processes. Stalin not only constantly
changed his personnel and remade institutions but he also kept the interpretation of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism in a condition of continuous flux, controlled only by himself. Communist China's Mao Tse-tung seems to have presided over a similar process, for example, by first promulgating and then revoking the doctrine of "letting a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend." In none of these cases was there either a regular publicly known procedure for effecting change or means by which individuals could anticipate which institutions or policies would be changed, and when. Stalin, in particular, skillfully manipulated and exploited this uncertainty. He would, for instance, appear to be moving to the ideological left, thereby enticing others to go even further in that direction through attempted imitation of the leader, and then apparently execute an extreme swing to the right, leaving his former followers ideologically exposed and ready for liquidation. The feeling of uncertainty created by such maneuvers probably contributed much more to the atmosphere of terror, which is generally associated with totalitarianism, than did the massive internal use of organized violence. Uncertainty meant, among other things, that the victims of liquidation might not know the reasons for their fate and, more important, that those who wanted to avoid liquidation in the future had no rational means for doing so. They could escape from the dilemmas of uncertainty neither by withdrawing from politics, because of enforced participation, nor by mouthing the current party line, because that would expose them to condemnation for merely mechanical commitment. Repeated executions of chiefs of the secret police can serve as a paradigm for this process. In nontotalitarian police states, by contrast, one chief of secret police often serves for several decades in that post. Although unpredictability and uncertainty are the most distinctive features of the totalitarian characteristics discussed so far, they are also the ones most likely to be moderated, or even eliminated, in political systems that retain or develop the other totalitarian traits. And although nontotalitarian systems sometimes seem to be developing the other features discussed, even long-established totalitarian systems seem to move away from unpredictability and toward more constitutional methods. For example, the longest-lived of the prototypal regimes, the Soviet Union, has emphasized "socialist legality" in the post-Stalin period, and some students of Soviet affairs have noticed the emergence of more clearly discernible social groups— party, bureaucracy, the military, management, and
TOTALITARIANISM others—that may be trying to stabilize relations between one another and the internal operating procedures within each. This has been explained as a result of the objective demands of efficiency in any modern industrial system. Uncertainty may bring about greater productivity out of fear of reprisals, but once a point of diminishing returns has been passed, it may actually interfere with planning for the single, substantive goal and, in general, reduce the leadership's capacity for total control. The single goal. Ruthless pursuit of a single, positively formulated goal is the most distinctive common denominator of totalitarianism. Nontotalitarian systems, to the extent that they articulate their goals at all, are either committed to a plurality of goals, such as those listed in the preamble to the constitution of the United States, or concentrate on such procedural goals as the settlement of conflicts, or state their substantive goals negatively, for example, the prevention of foreign domination. Excessive preoccupation with procedural goals can lead to bureaucratic or parliamentary routinization, as when the parliamentry opposition goes through the motions of opposing every government proposal only for the sake of observing parliamentary procedures and irrespective of any actual interest in the substantive issue. This cannot lead to totalitarianism in its usual meaning. On the other hand, the single-minded pursuit of a positive substantive goal, such as racial hegemony, the dictatorship of the proletariat, or the rapid industrialization of a backward economy, in utter disregard of all other possible goals, is characteristic of totalitarianism. All the resources of the system are ruthlessly harnessed to the attainment of the one great goal. An ideology is constructed to explain all reality with reference to this goal and to the obstacles encountered on the road toward it. Whatever is considered efficient with respect to overcoming these obstacles is done. Whatever is considered distracting from this singlemindedness of purpose is condemned and eliminated. As a result, no procedures are worked out for the resolution of disagreements. All disagreement within the system is identified as evil. Internal politics is, therefore, banned. But when unanticipated new substantive problems arise, as they inevitably do in the ever-changing modern environment, then there is a lack of adaptive procedures by means of which these problems can be tackled and disagreements about them resolved. The elite, as well as ordinary people, lack experience with or commitment to such workable procedures. For the same reason, the leadership cannot admit the
11 1
achievement of its original goal, since to pursue this aim is its only raison d'etre. Sigmund Neumann (1942) aptly described totalitarianism as "permanent revolution," since under totalitarianism the fundamental procedures of political adaptation are in continuous flux. The most distinctive aspect of constitutional systems, by contrast, is the comparatively procedural bias of sources of authority prevailing in them and the relatively strong procedural commitment of their leaders. These leaders rise to the top more because they are identified with the rules of the political game than because they have gained fame by bringing their supporters economic, cultural, or social advancement. It follows that the constitutional democracies most susceptible to totalitarianism are those in which top leadership is based upon substantive achievement, like military glory, cultural contributions to an ethnic group, great wealth. Germany and France illustrate the latter hypothesis; Great Britain and the United States, the former. Origins and causes Explanations of the rise of totalitarianism vary according to conceptions of the phenomenon. Those who focus on centralized, total control point to the complexities of modern societies and, more particularly, of modern economies. They often link socialism with totalitarianism and, for example, underline the inclusion of socialism in the title of Hitler's National Socialist German Workers' party. They also emphasize the totalitarian potential of the "creeping socialism" allegedly hiding behind the welfare policies of contemporary nontotalitarian states with mixed economies. Although this explanation may be consistent with assertions of the totalitarian distinctiveness of economic centralization and bureaucratization, it fails to account for the quite untotalitarian character of more or less socialist welfare regimes, such as those of Great Britain under the Labour party, India under the Congress party, Denmark and Sweden, and of various new African countries with governments committed to "African socialism." A second type of explanation relates totalitarianism to the rise of the masses to political participation and to the great military and economic catastrophes of the twentieth century. These disasters eroded whatever commitment to older values the masses may have had and, along with this, also weakened private organizations, thereby "atomizing" the masses and making them easy prey for totalitarian manipulators. Adherents of this theory usually emphasize the features of enforced participation and suppression of private organizations.
1 12
TOTALITARIANISM
The totalitarian distinctiveness of these features seems to be backed up by these explanations, but they do not account for the failure of similarly afflicted mass societies like the United States to develop the more distinctive and more vicious features of totalitarianism. A third category of explanation traces the origin of totalitarianism in the realm of political philosophy, for example, as the logical conclusion of doctrines of majority rule or as the final development of Rousseau's concept of the general will. Because Marxism belongs to both these lines of descent and the prototypal totalitarian ideologies have related themselves, either positively or negatively, to Marxism, a heavy burden of blame is placed upon Marxism. But such explanations exaggerate the independent influence of philosophies and ignore the ideological diversity of totalitarianism and, indeed, of the modern world. Why did neither the English-speaking countries, as heirs to the modern advocates of liberal majoritarianism, nor the French-speaking countries, as heirs to Rousseau, become totalitarian? Or, if all are believed to be moving in that direction, is not the concept of totalitarianism devoid of the minimal specificity of meaning required of useful tools of comparison and analysis? A fourth theory relates the origins of totalitarianism to anti-Semitism and to racial imperialism, especially in South Africa (Arendt 1951). It emphasizes the utter unpredictability of the Nazi and Soviet systems, stresses the role of secrecy and the secret police, and suggests that the dictators are not motivated by utilitarian pursuit of their stated goals but by a desire to eliminate the capacity to distinguish fact from fiction and to persuade mankind of the superfluousness of human beings. This interpretation, by assuming that the dictators intended to bring about the effects ascribed to their rule, overlooks the extent to which they themselves may have been victims of the uncertainty they created. This explanation of the origins of totalitarianism also fails to account for the rise of totalitarianism in some countries, say, Germany and Russia, and its absence in others, say, Great Britain, France, and Italy. These unsatisfactory explanations suggest that the greatest problem for future research on the topic of totalitarianism is the utility of the concept itself. The two systems that have so far provided subject matter for major case studies of totalitarianism—Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union —were strikingly dissimilar in many respects considered important by most scholars who use the concept. In many other important respects, each
of them resembled nontotalitarian systems. And this critique ignores Communist China, whose inclusion would go still further in showing the undiscriminating nature of the concept "totalitarianism." The word, which first gained popular currency through anti-Nazi propaganda during World War n, later became an anti-Communist slogan in the cold war. Its utility for propaganda purposes has tended to obscure whatever utility it may have had for systematic analysis and comparison of political entities. As the social sciences develop more discriminating concepts of comparison, as the developing political systems discover that the invention of new methods of modernization may obviate their need for slavishly copying more coercive methods from models whose experience is no longer relevant, and as, hopefully, the more glaring differences between the major parties to the cold war begin to wither away, use of the term "totalitarianism" may also become less frequent. If these expectations are borne out, then a third encyclopedia of the social sciences, like the first one, will not list "totalitarianism." HERBERT J. SPIRO [See also COMMUNISM; DICTATORSHIP; FASCISM; IDEOLOGY; NATIONAL SOCIALISM. Other relevant material may be found in DEMOCRACY; GOVERNMENT; and PERSONALITY, POLITICAL.] BIBLIOGRAPHY AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES 1954 Totalitarianism. Edited with an introduction by Carl J. Friedrich. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. -> Proceedings of a conference held at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, March 1953. ARENDT, HANNAH (1951) 1958 The Origins of Totalitarianism. 2d enl. ed. New York: Meridian. ARENDT, HANNAH 1963 Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking. BRZEZINSKI, ZBIGNIEW K. 1962 Deviation Control: A Study in the Dynamics of Doctrinal Conflict. American Political Science Review 56:5-22. COBBAN, ALFRED 1939 Dictatorship: Its History and Theory. New York: Scribner. FRIEDRICH, CARL J.; and BRZEZINSKI, ZBIGNIEW K. 1956 Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. KAUTSKY, JOHN H. 1962 Political Change in Underdeveloped Countries: Nationalism and Communism. New York: Wiley. MOORE, BARRINGTON JR. 1954 Terror and Progress— USSR: Some Sources of Change and Stability in the Soviet Dictatorship. Harvard University, Russian Research Center Studies, No. 12. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. MOORE, BARRINGTON JR. 1958 Political Power and Social Theory: Six Studies. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. NEUMANN, FRANZ L. (1942) 1963 Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 19331944. 2d ed. New York: Octagon Books.
TOURVILLE, HENRI DE NEUMANN, FRANZ L. 1957 Notes on the Theory of Dictatorship. Pages 233—256 in Franz L. Neumann, The Democratic and the Authoritarian State: Essays in Political and Legal Theory. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. NEUMANN, SIGMUND 1942 Permanent Revolution: The Total State in a World at War. New York: Harper. NOLTE, ERNST (1965) 1966 Three Faces of Fascism: Action Francaise, Italian Fascism, National Socialism. New York: Holt. -> First published in German. Ros SIXER, CLINTON L. 1948 Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies. Princeton Univ. Press. SPIRO, HERBERT J. 1962 Comparative Politics: A Comprehensive Approach. American Political Science Review 56:577-595. TALMON, J. L. 1952 The Rise of Totalitarian Democracy. Boston: Beacon. UTIS, O. 1952 Generalissimo Stalin and the Art of Government. Foreign Affairs 30:197-214.
TOURVILLE, HENRI DE Henri de Tourville (1842-1903), French sociologist, was the son of an eminent lawyer who belonged to the old aristocracy. De Tourville spent three years at the Paris faculty of law and one year at the Ecole des Chartes studying history before he decided, in 1865, to enter the seminary at Issy-lesMoulineaux. In 1873 he became vicar at St. Augustine's church in Paris and continued in his ecclesiastical career for eight years. The year 1873 also marked de Tourville's first encounter with Le Play, and he soon joined the circle of disciples that frequented Le Play's home. Beginning in 1876, de Tourville played a leading role in organizing a series of semipublic lectures designed to propagate Le Play's doctrines. These activities were terminated in 1881, when recurring illness forced de Tourville to abandon Paris for his family estate, where he spent most of the remaining years of his life. Le Play's monographs on individual families had frequently been criticized because they failed to develop any systematic linkage between the individual family and the rest of society. In an attempt to fill in what Le Play had left out, de Tourville developed what he called the Nomenclature of Social Facts. A general scheme for societal analysis, the Nomenclature is part of a long and continuing tradition. Its primary function is to provide a classification of the diverse "elements" and clusters of elements in a given society. The Nomenclature includes 25 major elements and over one hundred subelements; families may be classified according to their geographic location, occupation, property relationships, wages, education, and religion; they are placed in broader context through analysis of the neighborhood, the parish, the city, the province, the state, and the relations of the
113
state with foreign societies. De Tourville thus avoided Le Play's more restricted focus on individual income and expense ledgers in the study of family life. The Nomenclature permits comparison of its elements (or variables) within subsectors of a single society and cross-national comparison of patterns of interrelationships. These comparisons will generate hypotheses that can be tested and that eventually produce two types of laws: laws of causality (if x, then y~) and laws of coexistence (if x varies, then y varies). Comparison of different types of family relationships in France, England, and the United States led de Tourville to a further conceptual innovation, again based on a revision of Le Play's ideas. Le Play believed that the instability (by which he often meant political instability) of most western European countries is related to an unstable family organization. In many traditional, more stable societies, family organization is essentially patriarchal: several sons, with their nuclear families, hold property in common and live under the father's authority. With the death of the father, property and authority are transferred in toto to one of the sons. Le Play held that such a patriarchal arrangement results in greater stability than does a pattern of isolated nuclear families, each of which inherits an equal share of the paternal estate. De Tourville, however, largely influenced by Paul de Rousiers's study of American society, American Life, felt that the pattern of child rearing and the general types of values inculcated in the younger generation are more important than the specific mode of transferring property. He consequently developed a classification of four types of families, based on childhood socialization patterns and types of values: (1) The patriarchal family emphasizes the importance of the family community over the individual; self-denial is taught, individuality is suppressed, and children are not expected to form new family communities on their own. Societies in which patriarchal families dominate are generally conservative and stagnant. (2) The quasi-patriarchal family develops a certain minimum of initiative in members of the younger generation, but on the whole maintains the patriarchal family organization; individual members may leave for a certain period of time, but since they generally lack the initiative to form their own family community, they often return. These first two types were dominant in eastern and central Europe. (3) The particularist family instills in its children a strong sense of individuality and personal initiative; children are expected to manage their own affairs at a relatively young age and to form their own separate nuclear families. The particularist
11 4
TOYNBEE, ARNOLD
family was dominant in most Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon countries. (4) The unstable family instills neither the respect for authority and tradition found in the patriarchal family nor the sense of individual initiative of the particularist family. To fill the void, the state must provide remunerative employment and moral direction; isolated individuals and unrelated nuclear families depend on a centralized governmental bureaucracy for support. Such families were found in France and Germany. This general typology continues to be used, although sometimes with modifications, by de Tourville's followers up to the present time. De Tourville became the leading theoretician and organizer of a dissenting cluster of Le Play's disciples who in 1885 broke with the more traditional group associated with the Reforme sociale, the official Le Playist journal. The dissenters not only founded a journal of their own, the Science sociale, but also organized field trips and courses of instruction in theory and method. De Tourville himself published relatively little, but from 1886 until his death in 1903 he carried on an active correspondence with his numerous disciples, whose work he influenced considerably. These followers—in contrast with most Durkheimian philosophy graduates of the Ecole Normale Superieure, who were of middle-class origin—were generally recruited from relatively conservative upper-class backgrounds and had studied law or science and engineering at one of the Grandes Ecoles. Aside from a devoted core— Edmond Demolins, Robert Pinot, and de Rousiers, among others—most of the Science sociale group did not become full-time scholars but followed careers in business, law, or diplomacy. After World War i the Durkheimians, long in control of the Sorbonne, came to dominate the entire national university system, while the ranks of the Science sociale group were decimated and it declined rapidly. Paul Bureau and Paul Descamps did continue important work in the Science sociale tradition after World War i, but, for the most part, French social science has largely neglected the contributions of de Tourville and his colleagues. Outside France, however, de Tourville's work has influenced a number of British social scientists (Victor Branford, Patrick Geddes, A. J. Herbertson), Canadians (Leon Gerin), and Americans (P. A. Sorokin, C. C. Zimmerman). TERRY N. CLARK [For the historical context of de Tourville's work, see the biography of LE PLAY.] WORKS BY DE TOURVILLE
None of de Tourville's writings appeared in book form during his lifetime. His Nomenclature was developed in
a series of articles in 1886. Another series of articles on the historical development of the particularist family was published posthumously in book form in 1905. 1886
La science sociale, est-elle une science? Science sociale 1:9-21, 97-109, 289-304; 2:493-546. (1897-1903) 1907 The Growth of Modern Nations: A History of the Particularist Form of Society. London: Arnold. -» First published between 1897 and 1903 as a series of articles in Science sociale. First appeared in book form in 1905. Henri de Tourville, d'apres ses lettres. With an introduction and notes by Marie Andre Dieux. Paris: Bloud & Gay, 1928. Lumiere et vie. With a preface by Felix Klein. Paris: Bloud & Gay, 1924. Ordre et liberte. With an introduction by Marie Andre Dieux. Paris: Bloud & Gay, 1926. Piete confiante. With a preface by Felix Klein. Paris: Bloud & Gay, 1949. Precis de philosophie fondamentale d'apres la methode d'observation. With an introduction by Pierre Mesnard. Paris: Bloud & Gay, 1928. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
BOUVIER, CLAUDE 1907 Un pretre continuateur de Le Play: Henri de Tourville 1842-1903. Paris: Bloud. BUREAU, PAUL 1903 L'oeuvre d'Henri de Tourville. Science sociale 35:465-496. CHAMPAULT, PHILIPPE 1913 La science sociale d'apres Le Play et de Tourville. Science sociale New Series Whole issue 109. CLARK, TERRY N. 1967 Empirical Social Research in France: 1850-1914. Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia Univ. DEMOLINS, EDMOND 1903 Henri de Tourville. Science sociale 35:186-188. DEMOLINS, EDMOND; PINOT, ROBERT; and ROUSIERS, PAUL DE 1904 La methode sociale: Ses precedes et ses applications. Science sociale New Series Whole issue 1. DESCAMPS, PAUL 1933 La sociologie experimental. Paris: Riviere. DESMONTS, ABBE 1903 Henri de Tourville. Science sociale 35:269-272. DIEUX, MARIE ANDRE 1931 L'abbe de Tourville, 18421903. Paris: Flammarion. LAZARSFELD, PAUL F. 1961 Notes on the History of Quantification in Sociology: Trends, Sources and Problems. Isis 52, part 2:277-333. ->• Reprinted in the same year on pages 147-203 in Harry Woolf (editor), Quantification: A History of the Meaning of Measurement in the Natural and Social Sciences. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill. [PERIER, P.] 1947 Deux humanites; Orient-Occident: Blocs mondiaux, by Jean Philippe Robert [pseud.]. Paris: Firmin Didot. Recueil d'etudes sociales d la memoire de Frederic Le Play. 1956 Paris: Picard. ROUSIERS, PAUL DE 1892 American Life. London: Cassell. -> Published in French in the same year.
TOYNBEE, ARNOLD The first intellectual influence of importance in the life of the English economist Arnold Toynbee (1852-1883) was his father, Joseph, a surgeon and fellow of the Royal Society. Guided by his father, Toynbee developed a taste for the finer
TOYNBEE, ARNOLD models of English prose, especially the Bible, Milton, Gibbon, and Burke. Among the poets, Toynbee esteemed the Elizabethans, Shelley, and Keats. Scott and Thackeray were his favorite novelists. He was early handicapped by fragile health and, in the words of his close Oxford friend Alfred Milner, had "a strange, solitary, introspective youth, for he was never long at school, nor had he ... the love of games, the careless mind, or the easy sociability which make school life happy" (1901, pp. 11-12). At 19 he enrolled in Pembroke College, Oxford, largely because it was one of the cheaper colleges. But he speedily aroused the interest of Benjamin Jowett, master of Balliol College, who had him transferred to Balliol. Although Toynbee's health was too precarious to permit him to read for honors and he earned in consequence only an ordinary pass degree, his essays were so extraordinary and his personal qualities so outstanding that in 1878 he was made lecturer and tutorial fellow at Balliol. Toynbee's impact was partly the effect of what Jowett termed "his transparent sincerity," the absence of "any trace of vanity or ambition." Milner, who shared few of Toynbee's opinions, recalled nevertheless that he "fell at once under his spell and . . . always remained under it" (1901, p. 15). Toynbee combined intense religious conviction, saintly character, and dedication to the improvement of the working classes. In 1875 he came to political economy out of the same desire to do good that motivated his immediate Balliol successor, Alfred Marshall. As Milner said, "for the sake of religion he had become a social reformer; for the sake of social reform he became an economist." In his brief life Toynbee campaigned relentlessly for worker housing, parks, free libraries, and "all the now familiar objects of municipal socialism." He became a guardian under the poor law, a supporter of cooperatives, and a church reformer. One of his major activities was lecturing to working-class audiences on social reform, first in industrial cities like Newcastle and Sheffield and then in London. This aspect of his work was memorialized after his death by the founding of Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel, the first university settlement house. At Oxford, "the apostle Arnold," as he was affectionately called, did much to combat laissez-faire doctrine among both undergraduates and dons. The Industrial Revolution (1884), published posthumously, was Toynbee's single book. As his nephew, the historian Arnold J. Toynbee, has said of its detailed findings, "Toynbee's work has been superseded long ago." Nevertheless, Toynbee invented the term itself and supplied the argument for considering the industrial revolution as a "single
115
great historical event." The younger Toynbee's judgment, in his preface to the 1956 edition of the book, is just: "As a masterly first reconnaissance of a very important field of historical study, this pioneer work by a young man is still as much alive as ever it was" ([1884] 1956, p. ix). The volume has a second significance. In it Toynbee challenged the dominant economics of his time, allied himself with Walter Bagehot and T. E. Cliffe Leslie in the formulation of an alternative technique, and assisted in the development of an English version of the German arguments over the relative claims of history and analysis (the Methodenstreit). Never an extremist in this controversy, always willing to concede that deductive economics had its place, he nevertheless criticized a "wrong use of deduction . . . a neglect on the part of those employing it to examine closely their assumptions and to bring their conclusions to the test of fact." No wonder the deductive theorists produced such "absolutely untrue" doctrines as the wages fund. Historical method, on the other hand, was capable not only of tracing the "actual causes of economic development" but of identifying the "stages of economic development," comparing them with "those which have obtained in other countries and times," and ultimately evolving "laws of universal application." As an example of good historical method, Toynbee cited approvingly Maine's researches on the evolution of contract. Toynbee believed economic policies should be related to historical circumstances. Hence, the relative merits of laissez-faire and state action cannot be judged a priori. Although Toynbee's socialism was not of the collectivist variety, he favored extensive social legislation, relied heavily on the type of municipal socialism with which the Fabians were to be identified, and held high hopes for such voluntary workers' associations as trade unions, cooperatives, and friendly societies. Toynbee neither won nor lost the methodological argument. As the contemporary historian of economic thought T. W. Hutchison has said, "the inquiries of Bagehot, Toynbee, and Leslie . . . were scarcely followed up in subsequent decades" (1953, p. 429). Alfred Marshall, England's leading economist between 1890 and 1920, incorporated just enough historical material in his work to blunt the edge of controversy between marginalists and historians. But the methodological issues were discussed only casually and were scarcely settled convincingly by either Marshall or his followers. Toynbee died suddenly of a "brain fever" in his thirty-first year. His widow, Charlotte, survived him by nearly a half century. ROBERT LEKACHMAN
1I 6
TOZZER, ALFRED M.
[For the historical context of Toynbee's work, see ECONOMIC THOUGHT, article on THE HISTORICAL SCHOOL; and the biographies of BAGEHOT; LESLIE; MAINE. For discussion of the subsequent development of Toynbee's ideas, see INDUSTRIALIZATION.] WORKS BY TOYNBEE
(1884) 1956 The Industrial Revolution. With a preface by Arnold J. Toynbee. Boston: Beacon. -» First published as Lectures on the Industrial Revolution of the Eighteenth Century in England. 1910 TOYNBEE, JOSEPH; and TOYNBEE, ARNOLD Reminiscences and Letters of Joseph and Arnold Toynbee. Edited by Gertrude Toynbee. London: Glaisher. SUPPLEMENTARY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
HUTCHISON, T. W. (1953) 1962 A Review of Economic Doctrines: 1870-1929. Oxford: Clarendon. -> See especially Chapter 1. MILNER, ALFRED 1901 Arnold Toynbee. London: Arnold.
TOZZER, ALFRED M. Alfred Marston Tozzer (1877-1954), American anthropologist and Mesoamerican specialist, is best known as an archeologist, although his earliest work was in ethnology and linguistics. His subsequent work in archeology, particularly his Maya research, is marked by an integrated anthropological view of extinct cultures. He did his first field work, a study of California Indian languages, following his graduation from Harvard in 1900; in the summer and fall of 1901 Tozzer did ethnological and linguistic work among the Navajo in the Pueblo Bonito area of New Mexico. Late in 1901 Tozzer took his first field trip to Yucatan, as a traveling fellow of the Archaeological Institute of America. At this time the American consul and amateur archeologist E. H. Thompson owned the site of Chichen Itza, where Tozzer spent four months studying the Maya language. Thompson had begun to dredge the Cenote of Sacrifice at Chichen, thus providing Tozzer with his first exposure to Maya archeology. C. P. Bowditch, a patron of the Peabody Museum and a member of the Archaeological Institute, had suggested that the Maya hieroglyphic writing could perhaps be deciphered through study of an extant Maya group which had had no contact with Europeans and which might have preserved some knowledge of the ancient culture, perhaps of the writing system itself. Tozzer spent four years on a traveling fellowship of the Archaeological Institute, with the objective of locating and studying such a group. His ethnographic and linguistic work with the Lacandon Maya in the Lake Petha region of the Usumacinta —a group whose existence had previously been reported by Teobert Maler—and among the more
acculturated but linguistically related Yucatec Maya provided the material for his doctoral dissertation, submitted at Harvard in 1904 and published in 1907 by the Archaeological Institute of America. In the fall of 1904 he studied with Franz Boas at Columbia University, where he worked on a grammar of the Maya language which was published in 1921 (see 1921a). He did additional field work in 1905, exploring the Lacandon area and studying the Tzeltal, Choi, and Chintal dialects. Tozzer returned to teach a seminar in Maya anthropology at Harvard in 1905 and went on to spend a summer at the Archives of the Indies at Seville. His first basically archeological field work was undertaken in 1907 in New Mexico, on an expedition sponsored jointly by the Peabody Museum and the Archaeological Institute and under the direction of E. L. Hewitt; among Tozzer's colleagues were S. G. Morley and A. V. Kidder. In 1909-1910 Tozzer became director of the Peabody Museum Central American Expedition in Guatemala and published reports of the expedition's work at Tikal (1911) and at Nakum (1913). These studies were concerned with the correlation of dated inscriptions with changes in architectural styles; another achievement of this project was the discovery of the important site of Holmul, subsequently analyzed and reported by R. E. Merwin and G. C. Vaillant (see 1932). For the next few years, Tozzer taught at Harvard and traveled and collected specimens in Mexico and Yucatan for the Peabody Museum. In 1910 he became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 1913 he was appointed curator of Middle American Archaeology and Ethnology at the Peabody Museum. Tozzer then took a leave of absence from Harvard in 1913-1914 to succeed Boas as director of the International School of Archaeology and Ethnology in Mexico. His excavations at the Valley of Mexico site of Santiago Ahuizotla, which defined the characteristic Early Toltec ceramic type known as Coyotlatelco, were reported in 1921 (see 1921£>). This was Tozzer's last field work in Mesoamerica. After two years in the Air Services during World War i, Tozzer returned to Harvard and shortly thereafter became chairman of the department of anthropology. In the years 1928 and 1929 he was president of the American Anthropological Association and at various times served as representative of the Association on the National Research Council and the Social Science Research Council. He continued his teaching and his work at the Peabody Museum; in 1942 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
TOZZER, ALFRED M.
Tozzer's annotated and indexed translation of Bishop Diego de Landa's 1566 Relation de las cosas de Yucatan (see 1941) stands as a definitive work of Maya ethnohistorical scholarship. Landa's work, comparable in importance to Bernardino de Sahagun's sixteenth-century study of Aztec culture (see Sahagun, General History of the Things of New Spain) is probably the most important source dealing with the ethnology of sixteenth-century Yucatan and provided the key to those Maya glyphs, principally chronological and divinatory, that can at present be read. During World War n Tozzer served in Hawaii with the Office of Strategic Services. He had married Margaret Castle of Honolulu in 1913, and frequent trips to the Pacific had given him considerable familiarity with the area. Following his return to Harvard in 1945, he continued in teaching and administrative posts until his retirement. In 1948 he was named professor emeritus. Shortly before his death in 1954 he completed the study, published posthumously (1957), of the Chichen Itza Cenote of Sacrifice, the collections from which were then at the Peabody Museum. This work is a major synthesis of the preconquest history of Yucatan, drawing upon Maya codices, the ethnology of contemporary Maya groups, sixteenthand seventeenth-century documents in Maya and Spanish, and archeological data from the Maya area as a whole and from central Mexico. Tozzer defined five phases of the growth and decline of Chichen Itza, beginning with its Maya foundations and continuing through its political dominance of Yucatan under Toltec invaders from Tula, Hidalgo. After the foundation of the site of Mayapan, Chichen lost its supremacy and retained importance only as a pilgrimage site. Representations of Maya and Toltec in sculpture and painting and architectural changes at the site provided the basis for Tozzer's analysis of the changing relationships of these two groups in Yucatan. While rejecting many of the conclusions of nineteenth-century unilineal evolutionists, such as L. H. Morgan, Tozzer accepted several of the major tenets of this school. In Social Origins and Social Continuities (1925) he stressed the superorganic nature of culture, as did Spencer and Tylor. He asserted that culture, as socially learned behavior, is distinct from biologically inherited traits and therefore must be studied independently of biological phenomena. He also rejected diffusion and migration of peoples as necessary and sufficient explanations of culture change at a time when such theories were popular in anthropological thinking. The body of Tozzer's work shows his emphasis on
117
the need for integrated study of all aspects of culture: ethnological, archeological, and linguistic. Tozzer was a respected and popular teacher. A Festschrift entitled The Maya and Their Neighbors, presented to him in 1940, offers evidence of the wide influence he exerted on his students and contemporaries. BARBARA J. PRICE [For discussion of the subsequent development of Tozzer's ideas, see URBAN REVOLUTION, article on EARLY CIVILIZATIONS OF THE NEW WORLD; and the biography of VAILLANT.] WORKS BY TOZZER
1907 A Comparative Study of the Mayas and the Lacandones. New York: Macmillan. 1911 A Preliminary Study of the Prehistoric Ruins of Tikal, Guatemala: A Report of the Peabody Museum Expedition, 1909-1910. Harvard University, Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Memoirs, Vol. 5, No. 2. Cambridge, Mass.: The Museum. 1913 A Preliminary Study of the Prehistoric Ruins of Nakum, Guatemala: A Report of the Peabody Museum Expedition, 1909-1910. Harvard University, Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Memoirs, Vol. 5, No. 3. Cambridge, Mass.: The Museum. 192la A Maya Grammar: With Bibliography and Appraisement of the Works Noted. Harvard University, Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Papers, Vol. 9, No. 16. Cambridge, Mass.: The Museum. 1921fo Excavations of a Site at Santiago, Ahuitzotla, D. F., Mexico. U.S. Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin No. 74. Washington: Government Printing Office. 1925 Social Origins and Social Continuities. New York: Macmillan. 1941 LANDA, DIEGO DE Landa's Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan. A translation, edited with notes by Alfred M. Tozzer. Harvard University, Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Papers, Vol. 18. Cambridge, Mass.: The Museum. -> Written in 1566 and first published in Spanish in 1864. 1957 Chichen Itza and Its Cenote of Sacrifice: A Comparative Study of Contemporary Maya and Toltec. Harvard University, Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Memoirs, Vols. 11—12. Cambridge, Mass.: The Museum. -» Published posthumously. SUPPLEMENTARY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Maya and Their Neighbors. 2d ed. (1940) 1962 Salt Lake City: Univ. of Utah Press. -* A Festschrift presented to Tozzer. MERWIN, RAYMOND E.; and VAILLANT, GEORGE C. 1932 The Ruins of Holmul, Guatemala. Harvard University, Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Vol. 3, No. 2. Cambridge, Mass.: The Museum. PHILLIPS, PHILIP 1955 Alfred Marston Tozzer: 18771954. American Antiquity 21:72-80. -> Contains a comprehensive bibliography of Tozzer's works compiled by the Peabody Museum.
118
TRADE
SAHAGUN, BERNARDINO DE (ca. 1538) 1950— General History of the Things of New Spain. Florentine Codex, translated from the Aztec into English, with notes and illustrations by Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble. Monographs of the School of American Research, No. 14, Parts 2-6, 9-13. Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research. -> First written in Spanish and Aztec. The manuscript is kept in the Laurentian Library, Florence. First published in book form in the original languages in 1829-1830. Books 1-5, 7-10, and 12 have been published to date in English.
TRADE See INTERNAL TRADE; INTERNATIONAL TRADE; TRADE AND MARKETS.
TRADE, INTERNATIONAL See INTERNATIONAL TRADE.
TRADE AND MARKETS Trade may be defined as a repeated sequence of exchanges of goods; markets, as the economic institution created by regular trade between a multiplicity of traders. A looser use of the latter term is common in referring to the place or day for traders' meetings, but this usage will be avoided. Trade began early in human history, as evidenced by the presence of exotic materials in archeological deposits. Traders, regular trade, and markets figured importantly in the early documents from Near Eastern civilizations of the third millennium B.C. But price-setting or "open" markets, where large numbers of buyers and sellers establish the rate of equivalence between commodities in the course of trade, are more recent. Aristotle wrote about their beginnings in Greece; in some emerging nations of modern times market places with flexible prices have had to await the advent of centralized polities and a wider use of money; price setting outside the market is common in industrial society. Economists traditionally focus analysis on open markets and the relation of prices to volume of trade, and treat other forms of trade as variants. Ideally, in an open market the large number of traders gives a situation of "perfect competition," where the relations between price, supply, demand, and transactions made are worked out. In situations where exchanges occur at prices other than the competitive one, this is attributed to "imperfect competition." Sources of imperfection may be monopolies by buyers or sellers, government intervention, cartel agreements, inadequate communication among buyers or sellers, or weak bargaining posi-
tions—for example, by sellers of perishable goods (see Robinson 1933). In contrast, anthropologists describing trading practices outside price-setting markets have focused on the relative social positions of traders in the general social structure (e.g., Mintz 1959). Some convergence has occurred, however, since economists do analyze prices paid for services which are hidden in visible trade exchanges (good will, political support, etc.), and anthropologists have increasingly concerned themselves with prices. Anthropological studies of trading practices show an even greater convergence, in that the models of calculation used in nonindustrial societies that exist outside the open market help in understanding many trading situations in industrial societies. Five main types of trade have been reported by ethnographers: (1) market-place trade, (2) trading partnerships between individuals, (3) intercommunity barter, (4) successive distributions within communities, and (5) ceremonial gift giving. Market-place trade. In peasant societies with densely settled populations, market places are common when there is widespread use of money and where there are many small farmers who produce for subsistence and for exchange against goods sold by numerous small urban producers and sellers. Trading closely follows the open market model; prices vary with demand and supply but are generally uniform in any one market. Anomalies occur but are explicable. Variations in price result from the performance of economic services such as bulking of small quantities to permit uniform grading, or bulk breaking—e.g., packages of cigarettes sold by the unit. (For examples, see Dewey 1962, chapters 6 and 7.) Double pricing (e.g., one price for tourists and one for locals) reflects different degrees of knowledge of the market and of ability to bargain. When sellers and buyers have equal knowledge of the market, they interact universalistically, and not as members of social groups (Dean 1963). Each transaction is completed on the spot (i.e., caveat emptor applies). Buyers and sellers have no enduring relationship because of the sale, although general legal obligations may apply (e.g., to use fair weights and measures). Although bargaining is not universal, it is often seen as the main price-setting mechanism in market places. Frequently, however, sellers estimate a prevailing or market price before arrival, on the basis of previous prices and known changes in supply and demand. They roughly check estimates when they arrive. Underestimators sell rapidly and disappear from the market; overestimators may
TRADE AND MARKETS eventually reduce prices but usually wait to see if all lower-priced goods sell out. Prices rarely change, and when they do, the direction is mainly downward within one market. Bargaining, when found, enables sellers to make larger profits from unskilled buyers (especially when wealthy buyers are too status-conscious to bargain). The seller's asking price is a multiple of his estimate of market price but is lowered to that estimate if the buyer bargains well. Overeager or unskilled buyers permit sellers to sell above their estimated market price, and even to raise that estimate. Bargaining, then, facilitates upward changes in price. Prices are fixed basically by aggregate market conditions of supply and demand and by sellers' estimates of these. Trading partnerships between individuals. Partnerships exist when relationships between two traders persist apart from each specific transaction. They are found in peasant market places associated with open market trading (see Mintz 1961). In areas without market places (e.g., Melanesia) they are the major avenue of trade, with individuals traveling far to exchange specialty products with friends or categories of kin. Long-term credit relationships are a common form of partnership. The often-used term "preferred customer" is inappropriate in referring to trading partnerships. Terms of trade (or prices) do not consistently favor one partner in comparison with open market prices, but for each transaction they are settled in the light of the open market price and of the value placed on continuing the relationship. Economic analysis interprets each transaction as involving payment of a price for goods and a price for services performed. The service most commonly performed is the elimination of risk. Typically trader A accepts whatever goods trader B offers, on the understanding that trader B will either accept whatever trader A offers later or will continue to supply him when goods are scarce. Both traders insure against total failure to sell or complete cessation of supplies. Thus partnerships are found when goods fluctuate markedly in supply and demand (are perishable, produced far away or seasonally, or used irregularly in small amounts) yet are essential for the buyers or unusable by the sellers. To eliminate risk each partner must have sanctions available to force the other to behave predictably. Disruption of the relationship may be a sufficient threat. For example, a "special customer" in a Barbadian market may count on obtaining a scarce variety of banana each week, but he must also take any other fruits offered with the comment "I saved these for you," or else he will have his
11 9
supplies cut off. Social or physical sanctions may be invoked, however. In Melanesia a man must accept any "gift" from a partner or be publicly branded as uncivil; he must also later make an equivalent return gift of his own choice or allow the original donor to demand any of his possessions. The "court of public opinion" that often influences members of a common ethnic group may compel partners to live up to informal contracts, even at immediate personal loss. They can afford to deal in risky commodities when unpartnered traders cannot (Dewey 1962, pp. 44-51). Similar sanctions apply in inherently risky situations in industrial societies. Long-term credit relationships are a common type of partnership, especially where a peasant producer sells his crop to a marketing agent who also supplies him with consumer goods. Without an assured market for his product—which may be quite specialized—the peasant could not risk starvation by abandoning subsistence cultivation; the agent must supply consumer goods as demanded or risk not being sold the product which provides his main income. Most cash crops are really credit crops (Ward 1960). Trade through credit relationships facilitates the risky transition from subsistence production to a cash economy. Credit relationships also illustrate how terms of trade for each transaction are settled in partnerships. Debtors rarely quibble about prices of goods supplied on credit and frequently keep no records as long as quantities meet their needs. Popular descriptions of credit relationships stress the high prices charged (or fraudulent accounting) by expatriate credit merchants. They rarely note the merchants' obligations to accept debtors' produce as partial repayment, to continue supplying goods on credit as needed, and never to demand complete repayment. These obligations can be modified only slightly, and then in terms of the debtor's credit standing, not his current ability to pay. Thus the terms for each transaction are decided by one trader alone, in the knowledge that his partner will decide for the next one. Both demand as much as possible, within the limits set by "fairness" or the long-term need to satisfy the partner. Arensberg (1937) gives a description of this system in rural Ireland; to some extent the installment system, with its reluctance to repossess goods, provides a parallel in industrial society. Intercommunity barter. Intercommunity barter involves communities exchanging goods over a long period, at agreed or customarily fixed rates which do not vary at each transaction. "Administered trade" (Polanyi et al. 1957) is that variety in which
120
TRADE AND MARKETS
traders are political representatives of their communities; silent trade occurs when exchanges are made without discussion at customary rates; monopolistic or oligopolistic export and import trading (see Bauer 1954) follow a similar pattern. Goods so bartered are produced at a distance from their consumers, and demand for them is "lumpy" or widely varying, absolutely small but insistent. Examples are the demand for salt in inland continental areas, for manufactured tools and cloth by farmers, or for exotics and precious metals in early empires (Schafer 1963). In Bauer's terms, these are "standardised staples" or "complex durable goods with a small number of buyers"; in these cases there is little need for "judicious gauging of the requirements of individual customers." The long-term community agreement on fixed rates despite temporary scarcities or gluts may on occasion disadvantage either party, and individuals may try to exploit the situation by open market trading. Communities act to prevent such "black market" trade by isolating potential traders. One mechanism for this is the "port of trade," or the enclave where foreign traders freely meet appointed local representatives, but within which they are confined. This practice was common in ancient Babylon and is similar to modern governmental trading missions. Differential currency exchange rates and import licensing are legal mechanisms of isolation. Another practice has been to centrally control the production of goods for barter. Royal monopolies (through guilds) of gold, ivory, spears, and slaves were techniques used in west Africa. A further isolating mechanism is to distribute the goods received in barter by central allocation. The goods may be allocated as stipends, as rewards for political services (as when only meritorious officials receive import licenses for cars), through rationing or free distribution, or by sale at standardized prices. Such prices, and the agreed terms of barter, are often phrased as "fair prices" or "equivalences." Alteration of them is morally condemned as "unfair." In economic terms, maintaining a regular flow of such goods entails many fixed costs for transport facilities, storage, and the training of technicians to produce and service goods. Guaranteeing demand and spreading it over a long period permit an even allocation of such costs. Barter agreements have some flexibility. Quantities may be defined flexibly (e.g., as all output greater than home consumption). New Guinea villages which annually barter surplus nuts for oil threaten to break relations only when quantities depart too radically from a "fair equivalent." Agree-
ments then are renegotiated, or a new agreement is made with a different village. Alternatively, a limited free or black market may be tolerated to relieve temporary short-run disadvantages. If black markets persist and grow, it indicates that the conditions for community barter no longer apply. Successive distributions within communities. Successive distributions within communities are made by individuals to all members of a community, with the expectation of being recipients of equivalent goods in later distributions. Most often involving food, they constitute trade because an individual receives goods different from those he supplies, and he trades a current surplus for a guaranteed future return when it is needed. Contributory insurance and taxation coupled with welfare payments are monetary forms of successive distribution. Such systems have sometimes been described as "primitive communalism." The label is inaccurate. Only basic necessities are usually so traded, but they are also distributed through other channels— people retain quantities sufficient for household consumption, and they may also exchange some surpluses in market places or with trade partners. Individual property rights prevail but are surrendered in exchange for a generalized claim against a community, not for specific claims over any one individual. Distributions are found, not under conditions of extreme or persistent shortage (during a famine the Eskimo abrogate the normal rule of distributing a hunting catch ) but, rather, when it is reasonable to expect that everyone may distribute in turn. Given relative affluence, individuals may insure against temporary shortages or fortuitous disasters. Distributions also solve storage problems, especially when preservation techniques are inadequate. Detailed accounting for every transaction between individuals would be invidious, difficult, and timeconsuming. This type of trade requires an approximate balance between what one supplies and what one receives, but the actual balance is never exact (Henry 1951). Productive people give more on balance than they receive; a few needy people are net receivers. All people keep a rough account of net balances, with creditors being judged as generous and socially responsible; debtors, as improvident and shiftless. Unless social esteem ceases to be an incentive, the effect of such distributions is not inefficient production or reduced effort. Consistent underproducers are scorned, but average producers, free from threats of starvation, can neglect extreme
TRADE AND MARKETS risks and gear production to over-all needs. Where possible, a farmer plants slightly more than his family needs in an average year, not twice as much. He harvests in bulk, rather than in inefficient small amounts, and relies on others for daily needs between harvests. Overproducers need not fear inability to dispose of surpluses or depression of prices, for distributions convert surpluses into prestige. There is a continual slight pressure to increase aggregate consumption and to reward industry by esteem. Overproduction may then occur and successive distributions may lose their function. Alternatively, periodic large accumulations may be channeled through political authorities and "redistributed" (Polanyi et al. 1957, p. vii) to finance public works. Ceremonial gift giving. Gifts presented in public on ceremonial occasions constitute trade insofar as they tend to be reciprocated. Mauss (1925) analyzed the pressures on recipients to reciprocate, the major one being that the recipient is minister to the magister donor until he does so. Economically, it is easier to see each gift as a two-sided transaction in which the donor gives goods and the recipient performs services. For example, the services are those of a bride when the goods form bridewealth, of immunity from revenge at peacemakings, or of providing an audience for boasting. Return gifts are, then, repurchases of the right to services. Thus ceremonial gifts allocate and distribute political rights where legal jurisdictions do not apply. Goods presented, or "valuables," are usually nonutilitarian or of primarily ritual significance (e.g., cattle in southeast Africa), but they may be decorative (e.g., shells in Melanesia) or utilitarian goods in quantities far greater than can be used (e.g., blankets among the Kwakiutl). Aboriginal Australia illustrates the extensiveness of such trade, for there varieties of stone, ocher, and resin and wood from special trees were found hundreds of miles from their provenience, passed from hand to hand in innumerable ceremonial presentations. Eventually utilitarianism may result from the aggregate flow of goods. But for donors unable to use valuables in personal consumption, the problem is to find recipients who will surrender political rights for goods. They try to speed purchases and to increase the size of gifts. Thus, if a standard bridewealth of 20 shells buys rights to a bride and some prestige, a gift of 25 shells should buy more prestige. Recipients may refuse 25 shells as "ostentatious" and more than they could pay in future bridewealths; they may accept 21 as "reasonable." The next bridal payment may be 22 shells. The
1 21
continual pressure for this sort of price inflation is held in check only by the scarcity of valuables. Scarcity means that donors can usually recover valuables only by surrendering rights, and so they can gain only small net balances of power. Political differentiation is limited (Salisbury 1963), unless some individuals consent to become politically inferior in exchange for a net flow of valuables. But politically powerful men may then recoup their valuables through taxation or enforced contributions. Alternatively, while donors stress the political claims symbolized by their gifts, recipients may try to ignore the political claims and stress utilitarian aspects. Donors may call gifts (or foreign aid) "charity" or "enlightened generosity" and expect gratitude; recipients may talk of the donors' need to dispose of surpluses and to encourage trade. In the classic description of ceremonial gifts—the Trobriand hula (Malinowski 1922)—both attitudes occur together. Various commentators wrongly assume that one or the other aspect of gift giving is primary. Moderate increases in the supply of valuables mean rapid increases in the size of ceremonial gifts (as in the examples of bridewealth inflation and of the trade in Hudson Bay blankets among the Kwakiutl [Codere 1950] and in shells in New Guinea [Salisbury 1962]). Increased leisure may also increase the frequency of ceremonials and gifts and, thus, the velocity of circulation. This alters the balance of political rights which ceremonial gifts regulate, by increasing social mobility or by enabling financiers to consolidate empires. During early periods of prosperity in industrial societies, the increase in philanthropy, conspicuous consumption, and extravagant entertaining and gift giving has a similar function. A permanent imbalance in access to valuables, despite speedier distribution through gifts, may cause a permanent imbalance in political rights, perpetuated by gifts. Recipients may then persistently refuse to recognize the symbolism of gifts, so that donors grow tired of presenting, or they may find other valuables to use in achieving a balance of "trade, not aid." Often valuables become so common as to lose their symbolism and are replaced by money. This may happen after ceremonial gift giving has provided some of the initial incentive for accumulation, entrepreneurship, and even cashcrop production. (The use of money to purchase political rights in times of affluence needs additional analysis.) Many authors have tried to arrange the above mechanisms of trade as an evolutionary progression
1 22
TRADE ASSOCIATIONS
(see Herskovits [1940] 1952, p. 183; Pearson 1957; Polanyi 1957), using trading as an index for the level of whole societies. This is inadmissible and is the result of inadequate functional descriptions of total societies. A single trading mechanism can never be the only form of distribution. All can occur together when different market conditions apply to different commodities or at different stages of distribution. Regularity of the market, the risks involved, and the relative power positions of traders are major determinants of the pattern of trade found. Nevertheless, in the course of world history there has been an increase of population, technological complexity, ease of communication and transport, and the size of domains of uniform law and order. Market conditions have changed accordingly. For long-distance trade, progressively wider and more regular markets, in which risk can be treated probabilistically and the power positions of buyers and sellers are equal, indicate a sequence of ceremonial gifts, intercommunity barter, trading partnerships, and market-place trade. In local trade the change from self-sufficiency to specialization demands more exact accounting and a change from successive distributions to partnerships and market places. Yet specialization creates new risks, and new goods and services for which the immediate market is limited. Bulk-breaking, futures, credit, and money itself are ways of adapting to new conditions. Political integration, fostering security within borders, creates new risks for external trade. Reactions to state control, vertical or monopoly integration of industry, subsidies, etc., do not fit theories of unilinear evolution, but can be analyzed in terms similar to those used to analyze trade and markets in the nonindustrial world.
RICHARD F. SALISBURY [See also ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY; ECONOMY AND SOCIETY; and the biography of POLANYI.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
ARENSBERG, CONRAD M. (1937)1950 The Irish Countryman. Gloucester, Mass.: Smith. BAUER, PETER T. (1954) 1963 West African Trade: A Study of Competition, Oligopoly and Monopoly in a Changing Economy. London: Routledge. -> An exhaustive microanalysis by an economist. BELSHAW, CYRIL S. 1965 Traditional Exchange and Modern Markets. Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice-Hall. CODERE, HELEN F. 1950 Fighting With Property: A Study of Kwakiutl Potlatching and Warfare, 17921930. American Ethnological Society, Monograph No. 18. New York: Augustin. DEAN, EDWIN R. 1963 Social Determinants of Price in Several African Markets. Economic Development and Cultural Change 11, no. 3, part 1:239-256.
DEWEY, ALICE G. 1962 Peasant Marketing in Java. New York: Free Press. -> An anthropological study Of widely ramifying marketing types. HENRY, J. 1951 The Economics of Pilaga Food Distribution. American Anthropologist New Series 53:187-219. HERSKOVITS, MELVILLE J. (1940) 1952 Economic Anthropology: A Study in Comparative Economics. 2d ed., rev. & enl. New York: Knopf. -> First published as The Economic Life of Primitive Peoples. A classic compilation of examples. MALINOWSKI, BRONISLAW (1922)1950 Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. London School of Economics and Political Science, Studies, No. 65. London: Routledge; New York: Dutton. MAUSS, MARCEL (1925) 1954 The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. -» First published as Essai sur le don: Forme et raison de I'echange dans les societes archaiques. MINTZ, SIDNEY W. 1959 Internal Market Systems as Mechanisms of Social Articulation. Pages 20-30 in American Ethnological Society, Annual Spring Meeting, Proceedings. New York: The Society. MINTZ, SIDNEY W. 1961 Pratik: Haitian Personal Economic Relationships. Pages 54-63 in American Ethnological Society, Spring Meeting, Columbus, Ohio, 1961, Symposium: Patterns of Land Utilization, and Other Papers. Seattle, Wash.: American Ethnological Society. PEARSON, HARRY W. 1957 The Secular Debate on Economic Primitivism. Pages 3-11 in Karl Polanyi et al. (editors), Trade and Market in the Early Empires: Economies in History and Theory. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. POLANYI, KARL 1957 The Economy as Instituted Process. Pages 243-270 in Karl Polanyi et al. (editors), Trade and Market in the Early Empires: Economies in History and Theory. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. POLANYI, KARL; ARENSBERG, CONRAD M.; and PEARSON, HARRY W. (editors) 1957 Trade and Market in the Early Empires: Economies in History and Theory. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. ROBINSON, JOAN (1933) 1961 The Economics of Imperfect Competition. London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martins. SALISBURY, RICHARD F. 1962 From Stone to Steel: Economic Consequences of a Technological Change in New Guinea. London and New York: Melbourne Univ. Press; Cambridge Univ. Press. -> A study of nonmonetary trade in Melanesia. SALISBURY, RICHARD F. 1963 Ceremonial Economics and Political Equilibrium. Volume 2, pages 255-259 in International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, Sixth, 1960, Proceedings. Part 1: Ethnologie. Paris: Musee de THornine. SCHAFER. EDWARD H. 1963 The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of T'ang Exotics. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press. WARD, BARBARA E. 1960 Cash or Credit Crops? Economic Development and Cultural Change 8, no. 2: 148-163.
TRADE ASSOCIATIONS See CARTELS AND TRADE ASSOCIATIONS.
TRAITS TRADE CYCLES See BUSINESS CYCLES.
TRADE UNIONS See LABOR UNIONS; for related material, see INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS, article on THE SOCIOLOGY OF WORK; LABOR RELATIONS.
TRAINING See ADULT EDUCATION; EDUCATION; LEARNING; TEACHING; UNIVERSITIES.
TRAITS The "trait" concept represents an attempt to account for consistencies within personality as well as to provide personality study with a long-needed, scientifically sound taxonomy. If one is to use a theory which states that personality has altered between occasion A and occasion B, through such an influence as cultural pressure or therapeutic effort, then one must know how to describe and measure the personality before and after this alleged influence has been at work. Most sciences have had a distinct taxonomic stage, in which they have set out to describe their subject matter accurately and to designate the units by which phenomena and their changes are to be measured. If personality is the central topic of psychology, then a glance at psychology's history will show that it has been an immature and even a problem science. It has always been eager to get at the ostentatious theories before it has done the humble work of describing and measuring the subject matter. Admittedly, any taxonomy can become the playground of pedants, and naturally such a perversion has occasionally occurred in science. But the faults of psychology, and of social psychology in particular, have certainly not developed in this direction. Through the centuries there admittedly has been considerable activity in describing personality, on the one hand by literary folk and on the other by medical men. The literary contribution has consisted overwhelmingly of what has been called an ideographic approach, concerned with depicting an individual personality in all its idiosyncrasy for purely aesthetic ends, without any regard for scientific principles. Occasionally, as with the literary characterologists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there have been explicit efforts to generalize about personality description, but these are of only historical interest to psychologists today. But the second source, the medical profession, beginning with Galen's description of the four tem-
723
peraments and their relations to four humors— choleric, melancholic, sanguine, and phlegmatic— has provided descriptions that have developed steadily over centuries. The most decided development occurred when Emil Kraepelin recognized the entity that is now called schizophrenia, and when Eugen Bleuler further recognized that psychotics, as well as normal individuals, could be arranged on a continuum from cyclothymic to schizothymic temperament. Naturally, most medical work has been concerned with abnormal forms of behavior, and medical concepts have crept into the description of normal behavior only through the popularization of clinical notions, as by psychoanalysis, and through the literary "sophistication" of describing as paranoid or psychotic individuals with whom one does not agree! [See the biographies of BLEULER; KRAEPELIN.] Types and traits. As one moves into modern treatments, which, by contrast to the clinical sources of trait description, go hand in hand with advances in measurement and statistical analysis, one must at the outset recognize the alternative technical paths of personality description constituted by "types" and by "traits." A type means a whole pattern that is repeated with a striking frequency and that can be distinguished from a number of other patterns that also have a noteworthy frequency of representation among individuals in the population. Thus, one may speak of a hero or a scoundrel, a schizophrenic or a hysteric. In speaking of type, one employs a noun; in dealing with traits, one basically uses an adjective. Thus, a certain fruit may be described, in terms of a type, as "an orange," and in terms of traits, as an object that is spherical, about three inches in diameter, orange in color, and soft to palpation. However, these two approaches should not be regarded as utterly distinct, but rather as two ways of conveying the same kind of information. Of course, it is true that people frequently employ the word "type" when they are using a categorical or Aristotelian mode of thinking, admitting no degrees of anything: a certain animal can be designated either a dog or a cat. When one uses the notion of "trait," on the other hand, there is invariably implied a definite characteristic of which one can have more or less. This is, nevertheless, not a fundamental distinction, since in any adequate use of the notion of "type," it is first defined in terms of positions on continua; for instance, horses and dogs can be described on a continuum of length. In recognizing two types, one merely admits that there are two "modes," in statistical terms; for example, values in a certain range occur very frequently for
124
TRAITS
horses and values in another range occur very frequently for dogs, while intermediate values are infrequently found for either species. Fundamentally, therefore, one must consider that a type is a pattern in trait measures falling at certain modal values. Consequently there is, in general, always a path of translation between description by types and description by traits. Incidentally, what has been said here about personality description by traits and types applies to the description of any object by any attributes. The theory and the statistics used in personality description belong, in principle, to any taxonomy; and the mathematical and statistical concepts that psychologists have recently developed likewise have the highest generality. Three approaches to traits. When the psychologist sets out to describe a personality by traits, he has three alternatives. First, he can define a trait as an absolutely specific and narrow aspect of behavior : for instance, canceling letters on a page of print at the fastest possible speed, biting one's fingernails, or disliking Siamese cats. Second, he can define a trait as a whole pattern or collection of such specific behaviors, as is done with such general characteristics as courage or sensitivity. This second alternative supposes that there is a whole aggregate of "trait elements" that "go together"; for example, that the courageous person will be brave at the dentist's and also firm in dispute. But in this second sense, the trait may be an invention of the psychologist's own mind, corresponding with nothing in nature. For example, it may turn out that the person who is courageous in climbing tall trees is not courageous at the sight of blood, or morally courageous in disagreeing with his neighbor. By following the first course and avoiding this uncertainty through referring to an absolutely specific bit of behavior and setting out to measure it, the psychologist certainly is in a scientifically safe position, provided people vary in the specified characteristic. But he is also in a scientifically depressing situation, for there will be a virtually infinite number of such specific traits and a limited number of psychologists—who may choose to operate with different traits and names and, like parallel lines, never come together in common researches. If the psychologist chooses to follow the second path—that of locating broad patterns—he may begin by stating, perhaps with the precise accompanying definition, what behaviors are considered to be covered by the trait he uses. Such a procedure may seem "operational" and, as such, of good scientific respectability. But the psychologist who follows this course is an unconscious humbug, since there is no
proof whatever that things will go together in the way that he says; and his ostentatious procedures of measurement actually guarantee only a hodgepodge of different units and miscellaneous contributions. The third course is the only one that satisfies the requirements of economy, of reality, and of conceptual clarity for experimental purposes. In this case, one first demonstrates or discovers the real "going together," or functional unity, of the elements of the constellation of behavior that will be covered by the trait named. Thus, one might measure thirty different kinds of specific courageous behaviors and put two hundred people in rank order on each one of them. If one finds the same ranking is obtained for a dozen out of these thirty forms of behavior—that is, that the twelve forms of behavior correlate highly—then one accepts this group of twelve behaviors as defining a useful trait. Of course, one may have to abandon the word "courage" and use some more technical term to describe these twelve forms of behavior that do not belong with the remaining eighteen. The general public has the right to keep its word "courage" for the entire group of thirty behaviors, if it so wishes, just as the psychologist has the right to use quite a new technical term for what he finds in a technically more sophisticated examination of personality structure. Indeed, he will do better if he invents a new technical term for anything that he can truly demonstrate, for he will thus avoid the trailing clouds of confusion that will forever dog the popular term. The psychologist uses the correlation coefficient to establish the degree of going-togetherness. He needs such a graduate index because in the complex realm of behavior there is seldom an all-ornothing relationship, but rather a tendency of two things to go together to a high degree or to a negligible degree [see MULTIVARIATE ANALYSIS, articles on CORRELATION]. Surface traits and source traits. In the third approach, there are still two alternatives that the psychologist can consider: he can use either a surface trait or a source trait. When a group of behaviors correlate from individual to individual, one is initially only entitled to call this functional unity a surface trait. When correlation coefficients between behaviors are arranged in a correlation matrix, the surface trait is recognized and denned by a correlation cluster; i.e., by a cluster of variables, each of which correlates with every other variable in the cluster to a marked degree. Such a cluster of variables may have no correlation with another cluster of variables and thus enjoys a certain independence.
TRAITS Methodological refinement occurs when it is recognized that the correlations among a set of variables may be a result of more than one influence. For example, if one takes a random sample of men in the street and tests them on vocabulary, speed in arithmetic, knowledge of American history, and knowledge of geography, it is likely that these four different kinds of performances will correlate positively and appreciably in all six possible subject pairings. In other words, the individual who is much better in one task will have a greater-thanaverage probability of being better in the others; and one can speak safely of a surface trait. However, this tendency of the four performances to go together springs from two sources. On the one hand, it is caused partly by individual differences in intelligence, so that although all the men may have been equally exposed to the same school subjects, one will have learned much more in all four areas than will another. On the other hand, it also springs from differences among the individuals in length of schooling, since all four areas happen to be simultaneously taught in school. These two influences are said to be source traits, since they are basic sources, or causes, of common variance and therefore account for the observed correlations. Factor analysis. The discovery of such underlying source traits among observed correlations has become possible through the method of factor analysis, which was devised by Charles Spearman (1927) and continued by L. L. Thurstone (1935; 1947) and others and which is today one of the most refined and flexible technical methods for analyzing trait structure. If the mathematical psychologist is presented with the complete intercorrelation matrix for many forms of behavior measured in many people, he can, by factor analysis, arrive at the number and to some extent at the nature of basic sources of variance, which are necessary to account for the correlations [see FACTOR ANALYSIS]. Common and unique traits. Another distinction among trait concepts, which cuts across the surface-source differentiation, is that between common traits and unique traits. A common trait is one that everyone can be said to possess in some amount, such as intelligence, pugnacity, or sensitivity. A unique trait, on the other hand, is something on which no one but the person being described can be measured. An extensive discussion of this distinction has been made by Allport (1937), but not necessarily in statistical terms. It should be noted at the outset that one can, if necessary, abandon unique traits without abandoning at all the idea of the unique individual. One has only to think of any common trait as a set of coordinates,
125
and to remember that the individual can be placed as a unique point in space in regard to a set of such coordinates (which normally would lie in hyperspace). Furthermore, in the same terms one can handle not only the uniqueness of the person but also what many people are thinking of when they speak of the "uniqueness of a trait." Indeed, it should be noted that in general the same absolute level of performance in any specific task can always be reached by many different combinations of the same pure common traits. Some statistical psychologists have been inclined to dismiss the whole notion of unique traits, saying that the ideographic approach in personality really belongs to art and, unlike the nomothetic approach, has no relation to science. Science is concerned with what is generalizable, and is interested in explaining every individual case in terms of common concepts. To explain the individual case in terms of individual concepts is to gain no economy whatsoever, in terms of either concepts or laws, and is a chimera. However, there are actually senses in which a unique trait, if precisely defined, has scientific meaning. First, in the whole area of dynamic traits and interests, such as the clinician is most concerned with, one often encounters traits on which relatively few people can be scored; for instance, a passion for Brazilian butterflies. It is in the nature of interests, especially trivial interests, that they can be very specific and peculiar; and it is indeed true that there is no way of handling them other than by that seeming paradox, a "relatively unique" trait—a trait of which only a few people have some amount. Second, and more important, if one correlates thirty aspects of one person's behavior over a hundred days, measuring these same thirty aspects of behavior each day, one can obtain, by what is called P-technique factor analysis, a pattern that represents a trait in the sense of a set of behaviors that covary from day to day. Such a pattern might be unique to an individual. For example, by such an approach anxiety can be clearly recognized as a factor within an individual; and in each individual this anxiety will express itself through slightly different means and object avoidances. Although this concept of anxiety refers to something unique to the individual, it still has scientific value, since through its use one may discover laws and make generalizations about the way this trait behaves over time in an individual. Trait modalities. It has long been customary to speak of three "modalities" of traits: abilities, or cognitive traits; temperament traits; and dynamic traits, or interests. The definition of the way in which these three kinds of traits differ has been
126
TRAITS
left mainly at a popular level, but an exhaustive technical definition has been attempted by Cattell (1957) in terms of whether the measurement made is most sensitive to changes in the complexity of the stimulus, in which case the trait is called an ability, or to changes in the environmental incentives, in which case it is called a dynamic trait. A temperament trait, largely independent of the stimulus complexity and of the level of motivation at the time, represents some kind of readiness to respond. It is a "stylistic" kind of attribute. (The implication that temperament traits are inherited is a secondary, not an essential, characteristic.) Normally, all three modalities of traits will contribute to any given piece of behavior, although in order to get a good measure of a trait that is primarily of one modality, one should try to choose those extreme examples in which the measure becomes largely independent of the other two modalities. Thus, in measuring the trait of intelligence, one tries to avoid measures that would reflect temperament differences and to control the motivation level of those taking the test. When one deals with common factor source traits as defined above, the interactions of different traits and different modalities in determining any specific behavior or performance can be expressed in what is called the specification equation, which is written
Here, the p, means a performance in response to the situation, j, which reaction is of the same nature for all people but differing in magnitude. Generally the T's are source traits which have the particular value, in a standard score, with which the individual is endowed; T t represents an ability trait, TT a temperament trait, T,, a dynamic trait. The T.s. represents a factor specific to the test situation. The s's are weights which indicate how the particular situation, j , provokes and involves these traits for people in general. These weights are obtained by the factor analysis, or simply by correlating the magnitude of the response, Pj , with the magnitude, of the trait, T, over a suitable sample of people. The i attached to the T's and to p indicates the score of a particular person i. The k, I, and m represent the number of the respective traits. This specification equation thus states that the given response or performance p is determined by the individual's endowments in ability, temperament, and dynamic (motivational) traits, and that these will operate with weights which can be determined factor-analytically for the given perform-
ance, showing the extent to which that situation involves the traits. Methods of discovering traits. The history of discovery and interpretation of particular traits is, of course, scarcely half written. The field of abilities, because of its intense interest to the educationist, has been most explored. Beginning with the location of a general ability factor by Spearman (1927), and the discovery by Thurstone (1935) of such primary abilities as number ability, spatial ability, verbal ability, and perceptual speed, and continuing into Guilford's recent work with cognitive traits that involve productive performance rather than judicious decision, perhaps thirty traits have been located (1959). Personality traits have been pursued most systematically through the rating and questionnaire media of observation and measurement. There are systematic differences between the oblique factor system used by Thurstone (1947) and Cattell (1957) in this field and the orthogonal system used by Guilford and Zimmerman (1956), among others. Typically, some twenty independent source traits or dimensions have been found through factor analysis, as exemplified in the Guilford-Zimmerman (G-Z) scales and in the Institute for Personality and Ability Testing (IPAT) 16 Personality Factor Scales (16 P.P.). Incidentally, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) questionnaire differs from the 16 P.P. in that it deals with surface traits, long traditionally established in psychiatric work, rather than with source traits, which were first confirmed in the normal range of behavior. All of the scales mentioned have by now been related to an appreciable number of real-life criteria, both normal and abnormal. The traits in the 16 P.P. and the High School Personality Questionnaire (HSPQ), for example, have shown themselves capable of a substantial degree of prediction in everyday life. The weakness in the questionnaire test medium is that it lends itself to faking or distortion through dishonesty or lack of self-knowledge. In response to this problem there has been considerable development of tests in which the person's behavior in a miniature situation is measured without his knowledge of what is really being measured. Correlating and factor-analyzing such behaviors reveals a set of source traits that can now be measured in tests, such as the Objective-Analytic Personality Test Batteries (O-A) (Hundleby et al. 1965). The relationship of the traits found in this type of objective test to those found in questionnaires (which are objective only in their scoring and are best called conspective—i.e., such that two examiners see the same score) is somewhat com-
TRAITS plicated. So far, what are called first-order factors in the objective tests have been revealed to correspond to second-order factors in the questionnaires. Approximately, one may state that a second-order factor is a broad influence that organizes primary factors. Thus, anxiety is a trait that shows itself in the questionnaire at the second order, accounting for variability in ego weakness, ergic tension, guilt proneness, and so on; but in the objective test realm (O-A), it emerges as a first-order factor, accounting for low skin resistance on the GSR, unwillingness to venture in a new situation, and large startle reaction to the cold pressor test. Consequently, one may measure the trait of anxiety with equal facility through either questionnaire or objective test. Trait stability and generality. As soon as a trait is clearly located and confirmed by research on different samples, the first questions one is likely to ask concern how the trait changes with age; whether it is largely inborn or largely due to environment; and what particular influences, in the latter case, will affect it. The applied psychologist is also immediately interested in knowing what predictive value the trait will have for him in clinical diagnosis, in predicting industrial personnel fitness, or in enabling one to select scholarship recipients more reliably. Spearman's general ability factor, for example, has been shown to hold as a unitary entity through all age ranges, although it changes its pattern steadily in going from, say, five years of age to fifteen years (1927). Nevertheless, this "identity in change" can be reliably and validly measured at any age level; its magnitude is found to climb steeply in the early years and to flatten out around fifteen years. It has similarly been shown repeatedly that the main personality traits—such as ego strength, cyclothymia-schizothymia temperament, dominance-submissiveness of disposition, surgency-desurgency, and radicalism-conservatism —as rated or as measured in the 16 P.P., the HSPQ, and the G-Z scales, maintain a continuity with age, and that one can measure the same factors at any age. There are a few traits that emerge in adults but do not appear in children; there are also a few factors on which children vary a good deal that contribute only trivial variance in adults. The dozen or so main factors, however, seem to persist very steadily. [See PERSONALITY, article on PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT.]
This continuity of personality trait structure is true for both the questionnaire and the objective test. The Early School Personality Questionnaire (ESPQ) and the O-A Battery for young children measure the same traits as do the HSPQ and the
127
regular O-A Battery—at decidedly lower levels of age. What is perhaps of greater interest to the anthropologist and the sociologist is the research demonstrating the degree of stability of these traits across cultures. It was theoretically possible that the results obtained through factor analysis in any medium—questionnaire responses, ratings, or objective tests—in, say, Japan or India would prove to be very different from those in America or France. Actually, recent work has shown quite clearly that the majority of general personality traits persist with considerable stability across cultures. Ego strength, schizothymia, superego strength, anxiety, and surgency, among other traits, seem to show themselves as basic personality dimensions in most cultures. The measurement of dynamic traits—i.e., of interests and motivation—by objective test methods has been pursued by many (Kuder, Strong, Guilford, Cattell, Eysenck, and others) but perhaps is still in its infancy. However, there are strong indications that the correlational analysis of traits in the dynamic field yields primarily what have long been recognized as basic drives, such as sex, fear, hunger, parental protectiveness, self-assertion, and curiosity. Additionally, there appear certain structures that have been called sentiments, or attitude aggregates, and that correspond to the individual's learning simultaneously whole sets of emotional attitudes and ways of behaving. This learning presumably occurs in response to the impress of some single social institution, such as a religion or the family. The dynamic structures that correspond to drives, or ergs, as they have been more recently defined, are expected to prove to be basic across cultures; the sentiment traits are almost certainly peculiar, to a considerable degree, to specific cultures. Thus the conclusion is reached that although it may be possible to compare certain traits across cultures, it is virtually certain that there are other traits in which it is meaningless to try to make a quantitative comparison. States and roles. Two concepts that clearly must be theoretically distinguished from traits are those of states and of roles. Failure to make this distinction also brings doubt and inaccuracy in the field of measurement. A state is defined as a pattern of covarying elements (as in surface traits and source traits) that does not show consistent, significant covariation in individual-difference measurements. A state is a pattern that shows differences only within one person, over time, and even then must be distinguished from a fluctuating trait. By a role, the psychologist (at least when he gets to precise measurement) must refer to a pattern of
728
TRANSFORMATIONS OF DATA
behavior, or an emphasis in behavior, that occurs only in a set of specific situations. In general terms, it can be said that a personality trait refers to a factor that operates over a wide array of situations, whereas a role factor is quite specific to a certain limited group of situations. The psychometrician is quite as prepared as the sociologist or the anthropologist to conceive that in principle an individual never performs an act outside of a role. However, the psychometrician is more skeptical than the anthropologist and the sociologist that one can detect, merely by inspection, what particular role the individual is acting. He prefers, instead of claiming to "know" a role, to locate role factors, just as one locates personality factors by actually correlating a set of performances and showing that certain stimulus situations tend to evoke similar behavior. The scientific study of roles in this sense is in its infancy, but the model is reasonably clear. In short, to detect a role, one looks for persisting correlations across situations that call forth many different traits; to detect a trait, one looks for a single behavior factor that runs across many different roles. Instrument factors. Related to the idea of role is the idea of "instrument factor." It has been found that in attempts to measure traits, there is apt to be a particular effect attributable to the kind of instrument or mode of observation used; for example, behavior rating, questionnaire, or objective test. Certain pervasive instrument factors therefore must be recognized, and their effects removed, before one can hope to get a clear concept of the trait or an uncontaminated measurement of it. The person as a functional unity. Misgivings are sometimes expressed that the notion of traits is an "atomistic" concept that succeeds in taking the individual apart but typically fails to put him together again. It is true that certain ad hoc trait scales with which psychologists have concerned themselves excessively are of this kind, in that, being arbitrarily set up, there is no way to combine the different scales and alleged "traits" in a rational fashion; they do not correspond to any real structures in the organism. However, if measures of traits are based on prior structural research that provides well-defined source traits, the individual can in fact be described as a single functional unity. Further, his total pattern as an individual can be expressed as a gestalt by a profile of scores on the basic source traits. The only limitation to this integration lies in the possibility that in some cases traits do not interact additively, but have a relationship expressible by a higher power. Actually, with quite minor exceptions, nonadditive treat-
ment has not yet been clearly demonstrated as a necessity, and the scientist should continue to use the simpler model unless it breaks down. At present, one adds a person's score on an intelligence trait to his score on a personality trait, such as ego strength, and to his score on a dynamic trait, such as interest in intellectual work. With this total, one can make a fairly good prediction of an individual's performance in some concrete intellectual endeavor. RAYMOND B. CATTELL [Other relevant material may be found in APTITUDE TESTING; FACTOR ANALYSIS; PERSONALITY; PERSONALITY MEASUREMENT; ROLE; VOCATIONAL INTEREST
TESTING; and in the biographies of SPEARMAN; THURSTONE.] BIBLIOGRAPHY ALLPORT, GORDON W. 1937 Personality: A Psychological Interpretation. New York: Holt, CATTELL, RAYMOND B. 1957 Personality and Motivation Structure and Measurement. New York: World. CATTELL, RAYMOND B.; and SCHEIEK, I. H. 1961 The Meaning and Measurement of Neuroticism and Anxiety. New York: Ronald Press. EYSENCK, HANS J. (1953) 1960 The Structure of Human Personality. 2d ed. London: Methuen. GUILFORD, JOY P. 1959 Personality. New York: McGrawHill. GUILFORD, JOY P.; and ZIMMERMAN, W. S. 1956 Fourteen Dimensions of Temperament. Psychological Monographs 70, no. 10:1-26. HALL, CALVIN S.; and LINDZEY, GARDNER 1957 Theories of Personality. New York: Wiley; London: Chapman. HUNDLEBY, JOHN; PAWLiK, KURT; and CATTELL, RAYMOND B. 1965 Personality Factors in Objective Test Devices: A Critical Integration of a Quarter of a Century's Research. San Diego, Calif.: Knapp. JUNG, CARL G. (1921) 1959 Psychological Types: Or the Psychology of Individuation. London: Routledge. -> First published in German. ROBACK, ABRAHAM A. (1927) 1952 The Study of Character, With a Survey of Temperament. 3d ed., rev. & enl. London: Routledge; Cambridge, Mass.: Sci-Art Publishers. SPEARMAN, CHARLES E. 1927 The Abilities of Man: Their Nature and Measurement. London: Macmillan. SPEARMAN, CHARLES E.; and JONES, LLEWELYN W. 1950 Human Ability. London: Macmillan. -> A continuation of Spearman's The Abilities of Man, 1927. THURSTONE, Louis L. 1935 The Vectors of Mind: Multiple-factor Analysis for the Isolation of Primary Traits. Univ. of Chicago Press. THURSTONE, Louis L. 1947 Multiple-factor Analysis. Univ. of Chicago Press. ->• A development and expansion of Thurstone's The Vectors of Mind, 1935.
TRANSFORMATIONS OF DATA See
under
STATISTICAL
PROBLEMS OF.
TRANSHUMANCE See PASTORALISM.
ANALYSIS,
SPECIAL
TRANSPORTATION: Social Aspects TRANSPORTATION i. SOCIAL ASPECTS ii. ECONOMIC ASPECTS in. COMMUTATION
Joel Smith John R. Meyer Leo F. Schnore
SOCIAL ASPECTS
The term "transportation" is used variously to designate the process, the means, or the systems whereby socially meaningful objects are conveyed through space. Transportation involves the relocating of such objects, by an energy-consuming mechanism, through an environmental medium; the social consequences of transportation may be both intended and unintended. This breadth of reference indicates a concept that is not easily definable, for it does not refer to a clearly delimited aspect of social reality. When the objects being transported are human beings, or when humans move by self-locomotion, in conceptual terms transportation merges with mobility. At another extreme, when objects are messages composed of meaningful symbols, transportation blends with communication. Perhaps this definitional ambiguity reflects the fact that transportation is the basic process by which direct physical contact and exchange among social units is attained and maintained. Given that transportation is a basic support to social organization and communication, it requires systematic organization in the interest of reliability. Scholars in various fields have been concerned with one or more of the elements involved in transportation: the character and distance of the space to be traversed; the technological and energy resources available for and actually in use; personnel and skills; motives, decision-making processes, and knowledge that bear on use, operation, and other related activities and decisions; the organizational characteristics of systems; and the diverse social consequences of system qualities and use. Historical development The inability to mass at one point in space all resources, persons, and related activities essential for minimal social life necessitates movement. Movements have varied in frequency, distance, timing, temporal extension, and function among different societies in different epochs, according to variations in environmental contingencies, aspirations, and levels of knowledge. Furthermore, the ability to achieve economical movement has been a condition necessary to the maintenance of any stable culture.
129
Early men were largely nomadic. Having only minimal cultural attainments, they survived by living off relatively inhospitable and easily exhausted environments. Survival required periodic movement from depleted to more sustaining areas. Prior to the domestication of animals and basic transportrelated inventions, such as the wheel, this movement was difficult and dangerous; however, there is evidence that even then the more advantaged groups also organized some movement for trade purposes (Brew 1950). All movement depended on the availability of passable routes, environment being the key determinant of direction, speed, and distance. With the development of permanent settlements, nomadic wandering declined, but a different type of movement remained an essential part of the way of life. The agricultural, hunting, and pastoral economies of these settlements required regular movements, functionally akin to the modern journey to work, away from clustered residences to the locations of sustenance activities. Together with other factors, inefficient and high-energy-consuming transportation and production technologies kept the populations and land areas of these first permanent settlements small by modern standards. Technological innovations facilitated developing complexity and specialization in social organization. As isolated societies accumulated surpluses in goods, services, personnel unneeded for primary economic activities, and transportation resources, and as tastes were developed for unavailable goods and services, regular trading over established longdistance routes increased markedly in scope and quantity (Childe 1942, chapters 3-4). While technical skills, transport capacity, and related knowledge of transport principles and environments were adequate for the establishment of such routes, transportation was neither easy nor always successful. Means of transportation that permit uninterrupted movement on land, water, or in air, in any combination, or through all the markedly different conditions that exist within a medium, have never been contrived. Hence, the conduct of long-distance trade required the establishment of settlements wherever environmental variations along routes required the transfer of goods and travelers from one mode of transportation to another. A number of the major cities of the world originated as settlements at what were break-in bulk points for the transportation systems of the time. This is not intended as support for a single-cause theory of urban settlement and location, nor does it imply that the effect of transportation on urban
730
TRANSPORTATION: Social Aspects
settlements is always growth and development. As Cottrell's apt title "Death by Dieselization" (1951) suggests, improvements in technology or routes may result in urban decay or abandonment. Settlements with origins in the provision of transportation-requiring services are most likely to thrive and survive when, for whatever reason, their functional bases expand and/or when their locations have been determined by very drastic environmental barriers, such as the shift from land to water or from plains to mountains (Chinitz 1960). The early empires. The sociopolitical epoch of small city-states was followed by the period of large nation-states and empires which exploited their transportation resources—in conjunction with combined population, military, and diplomatic advantages—in order to establish integrated rule over vast areas containing many formerly independent units linked only by trade relations. These large political units owed their success and stability in large part to the development, maintenance, and operation of improved transport nets, which facilitated rapid movement of the considerable quantities of military, political, and economic goods and personnel so necessary to a large integrated nation. To a degree no longer the case, the transportation networks of the time were also the communication networks. The road systems of the Romans, the Incas, and the Mayas provide classic illustrations of these systems (Cooley 1894), although mastery of water transport was often equally critical. Within the borders of such nations space represented a cost of ordered integration, being paid for in the value of resources committed to transportation. In fact, the boundaries of these early empires were determined to a great extent by their relatively primitive means of transportation; seas, mountains, and rivers set natural limits to expansion. Modern empires. After the period of the early great empires and a period of decline or arrested growth in the West during the Middle Ages, came the period of newer territorially diffused empires of Western nations. In this modern era, initiated by trade revivals and characterized by more advanced levels of social organization and cultural accomplishment, transportation was, as the case of Great Britain so well exemplifies, a key to empire. At least in its inception, the course to empire was intertwined with knowledge of and capacity for marine transportation. While contiguous segments were linked by road, canal, and, later, rail nets, maintenance of effective central organization and control of dispersed colonies depended upon reliable and dependable navies and merchant marines. Toward the end of the period of imperialism, inno-
vations in rail and road transportation had so enhanced the ability of imperialist nations both to organize the mother country and to exploit a few particularly desirable colonies that large empires were no longer as advantageous as they were in the nineteenth century (Wolfe 1963, pp. 70-91). Of course, the assertion by most former colonies of their independence left the imperialist nations little choice in this respect. Modern air transport technology, in a world in which major powers conduct their foreign affairs with subtle and covert techniques of influence and exploitation, has all but obviated recent geographic patterns of empire and spheres of control by affording rapid access to any point on the globe. Not only may such empires no longer be desirable or necessary, but aircraft, as yet, cannot sustain indefinitely the large-scale movements of goods and persons necessary for building and maintaining them. In contrast, modern transportation innovations have enabled expansion of the land boundaries of the larger, more powerful nations, often permitting them to surmount former environmental barriers. However, even today, major barriers like the Pamir Knot or the Andes, particularly when approached through equally difficult environments for land or water transport, act as restraints on expansion into contiguous areas. The study of transportation Social scientists of all disciplines, interested in such diverse problems as settlement patterns, international politics and warfare, spatial organization of societies and their economies, and land values, repeatedly find themselves concerned with some aspect of transportation. A synthesis of their efforts permits the statement and critical assessment of certain propositions concerning transportation. Technological innovation. Transportation technology includes vehicles and fixed routes imposed on free space, as well as assorted service, control, and administrative complexes. The latter sustain and increase the speed, range, and load capacities of the former. As a human creation, technology is potentially completely alterable within natural limitations; change is restricted largely by ignorance, inertia, and scarcity of resources. However, man has failed to invent vehicles with large load capacities that can efficiently pass from one medium to another. In fact, no operational vehicle has yet been contrived that can operate uninterruptedly under all conditions that may be encountered in a single medium. Innovations in technology are generally less expensive and more manageable than alterations in environments. However, costly environ-
TRANSPORTATION: Social Aspects mental alterations, by such means as tunneling, bridging, canal digging, and regrading, have often been undertaken as a result of technological innovations (railroads, for example) that offered substantial gains in speed or load capacity (O'Dell 1956). Adoption of possible transportation innovations is not necessarily a direct function of financial returns. In some cases, innovations that raise costs and/or reduce returns are adopted out of sheer miscalculation or for military, political, or other considerations. In other cases, as inaction on proposals for tunnels under the English Channel and slowness in installing safety devices in automobiles exemplify, economically feasible innovations remain unimplemented because they raise fears or run counter to long-established public tastes. Feasible innovations sometimes await developments in related nontransportation technologies for implementation. For example, because a destroyed bridge might block a vital harbor mouth, bridges were not built over strategic harbor entrances until improved salvage skills had enabled rapid unblocking of harbors or until innovations in military technology had antiquated the once strategic installations that might have been isolated. Thus the process of innovation in transportation depends not only on knowledge and resources for direct manipulation of the environment and transportation technologies, but also on tastes, irrational fears and desires, and innovations in related skills and technologies. Rationality in transportation systems. Most of the considerable monetary cost of transportation systems is incurred by creating, operating, and maintaining various technologies. In addition, there are always some psychic costs entailed in making decisions regarding innovations and use, as well as indirect costs that may arise in diverting resources from other potential uses. Social scientists generally adopt some form of rationalistic model for handling these various costs in analyzing solutions to transportation problems or decisions involving transportation. One example of this is the "transportation model" developed by mathematical statisticians for solving a class of managerial problems involving the optimum allocation of resources over a set of means to attain a set of ends (Churchman et al. 1957, pp. 283-292; Ferber & Verdoorn 1962, pp. 190-194). However, even if we grant intrinsic rationality, considerations of consumer behavior and route location make it clear that no simple model is adequate and that only highly elaborated complex models will make many aspects of transportation appear rational (Garrison I960; Haggett 1965, pp. 24-25, 32-33).
131
In one sense, transportation systems in operation are reflections of the decisions and actions of individuals with optional means of movement. The resultant complexities can be illustrated by considering the resident of a large metropolis who must travel to work. While public rapid transit is most economical both of time and of money, large and increasing proportions of suburbanites drive to work in private automobiles despite the high and rising personal and social costs (Elias et al. 1964, pp. 150-165; Gottmann 1961, pp. 631-690; Smith 1959, pp. 20-24; Great Britain 1963). This behavior is not necessarily a result of ignorance or irrationality. Other explanations are suggested by the finding that among Chicago suburbanites an average payment of 20 cents a trip would be required to divert 37 per cent of the drivers to a public transit system for the trip to work (U.S. Congress 1962, p. 49). For example, social prestige may be at stake. However, in what fashion? Does nondriving diminish prestige, or does driving increase it? This example illustrates some of the major difficulties of rationalistic models in dealing with the behavioral aspects of transportation. Nonfiscal and nontemporal considerations—comfort, convenience, prestige, and so forth—are unidentified or difficult to quantify in comparable units of measurement (Lang & Soberman 1964, pp. 90-99; Lansing &. Mueller 1964, pp. 63-95). Rationally, routes would follow lines that minimize the time and money costs of distance. In a homogeneous passable environment, they would be straight lines (Taaffe 1956). Environmental difficulties will of course induce various deviations for different means of transportation. However, transportation routes and the networks they comprise deviate from minimal distance arrangements even more than environmental and technical considerations demand. If route location is viewed as the outcome of free competition for available desirable space, a number of other considerations are suggested (Mayer 1944). For example, competitors with greater power may force route deviations for reasons not basically relevant to transportation, such as fear of noise or dirt nuisances. Prior property rights sustained by social tradition may result in circuitous routes. Road improvements in downtown Boston, for example, are hindered by the location of Boston Common and various historic sites (Firey 1945), and in the American Midwest local roads run largely at right angles owing to the original principles of surveying and parceling out land in quarter sections. The intrusion of historical residues, differential social power, and conflicting social values into a situation already complicated
132
TRANSPORTATION: Social Aspects
by environmental, technological, and economic considerations can result in transportation routes and networks that have no visible rationality (Levin 1950). Competition for space. In the competition for scarce, valuable space, the effectiveness of the transportation sector varies. Transportation enterprises, having great financial resources, are usually able to claim space as desired in inexpensive open areas. The greater the density, the more intense the use, and the greater the number and variety of competitors, the less advantaged are transportation enterprises in the competition (Wingo 1961). In the city these conditions coalesce, and transportation is therefore at its greatest disadvantage. Nonetheless, it has been reported, from an analysis of land-use studies conducted in 53 American cities between 1935 and 1952, that streets and railroads occupy 33 per cent of the available space (Bartholomew 1955, p. 170, table 3). If this estimate had also included space used for bus depots, offices, airports, docks, and the wider rights of way of modern streets and expressways, the proportion would have been considerably larger. Under these circumstances, the success of transportation services in satisfying additional space needs might force out the other land users who generate these needs. Moreover, to the extent that transportation reduces the supply of space available to other consumers, it increases their willingness and need to commit greater resources to the competition for space. This suggests that the space demands of transportation in the large city have generated an unstable disequilibrium that is not portrayed adequately by a simple rational model. Any apparent stability is often a historical legacy of an uneconomic pattern that has been frozen because of the large investments committed and the sheer difficulty of destruction and construction in the central city. Systematization. The fixity of routes is but one aspect of the patterned order of transportation systems; orderliness is also reflected in priorities of user claims in any given system, and temporal cycles in the amount and composition of traffic (Foley 1954; Mitchell & Rapkin 1954, pp. 20-177). Generally, the more restricted and expensive a path, the more regular, restricted, and patterned is the movement of vehicles in a system. Cyclical changes in traffic magnitude and composition are a function of such interrelated factors as requirements of cargoes; conventional desires and customs of passengers as to travel conditions and timing; and daily or seasonal changes in such factors as hours of daylight, climate, and weather. The over-all sys-
tematization of transportation arises from the interaction among the aforementioned constraints; the concern of management with protecting property and regular returns on large investments; and the general social demand for reliable, dependable, and usable transportation systems. Transportation and social control A system of transportation, like any other kind of system, cannot work without rules; moreover, the rules have to be enforced. This has been true throughout history; but modern nations resort to legal codes and formally constituted administering and enforcing agencies to a much greater degree than was once the case. The more expensive, complex, and potentially dangerous the technology and the more socially significant the system, the greater the likelihood that every aspect of the system will be subject to such control (Meyer et al. 1959, pp. 203-273; U.S. Congress 1961). As nations have developed, folkways, mores, customs, and conventions covering such system aspects as rights of way, maintenance of way, and direction of travel have been reinforced by formal laws. The variability in the thoroughness with which laws cover system operation is considerable. For example, walking and bicycling seem like free movement in contrast to railroading, where every aspect of operation is covered by law. Nonetheless, such laws as those which regulate street crossing, walking on expressways and bridges, and rights of way at intersections assure that even relatively free systems operate in an adequately orderly and predictable fashion (see Labatut & Lane 1950). The agencies of control span the range from police agencies and ordinary multifunctional courts that enforce and punish transgressions of laws governing the relatively free systems to independent, complex, interlocking bureaucratic agencies that administer rules governing the more completely controlled systems (U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations 1961). As societies grow in size and complexity and become increasingly dependent on transportation for survival, control has moved from the sphere of the informal and individual to that of the formal and social. As the major representative of the public interest, government has often assumed not only control rights but also ownership of public transportation facilities (Bauer & Costello 1950, pp. 230-260). This has occurred even in societies that are otherwise ideologically committed to free enterprise economies. At a minimum, streets and highways are almost always owned by governments. In addition, it is not uncommon for some or all rail, air, and
TRANSPORTATION: Social Aspects maritime transportation to be operated under government ownership. The importance of control in maintaining and insuring dependable transportation is also indicated by the pattern of penalties invoked for the transgression of rules and operating failures. While extreme and unusual, the former practice of hanging horse thieves in the American West is vivid testimony to this concern. In another vein, the varied legal powers invested in ship captains, airplane pilots, and railroad conductors are unmatched in other roles involving responsibility for operating complex machinery. Business failures in transportation are also handled differently: whereas most other failing businesses can dissolve, bankrupt transportation enterprises usually must be reorganized. Frequently the government will assume ownership at this point. Social consequences. The manifest functions of any transportation system are to move goods and persons. From the perspective of users, since such movement is costly, these functions are rarely viewed this narrowly. Rather, they are viewed in conjunction with motives—the ends for which transportation activities are undertaken. Commonly recognized ends involve all aspects of human life .the economic, political, military, social, and so forth (Cooley 1894). In essence, regardless of whether actual movement produces intended ends, transportation systems are ordinarily considered facilitating agents for integrating or maintaining society. Raw materials are moved to factories, manufactured goods to markets, troops and military supplies to threatened borders or vulnerable sectors of enemy land, labor surpluses to labor shortage areas, and so on. There seems little doubt that the social role ascribed to transportation is a highly valued one. It is not uncommon to describe transportation innovations as "revolutionary." Judgments of this kind depend largely on hindsight, since it is the range and magnitude of unanticipated consequences that strike the imagination. The automobile, for example, is credited with initiating and sustaining metropolitan decentralization, fragmenting the family, strangling central cities, increasing sexual promiscuity, creating a significant new source of mortality, and much more. Expanding railroad nets have been given credit variously for the settlement and integration of many nations, including the United States. William F. Ogburn (1946) argued that changes from horse and wagon to railroad, from railroad to automobile, and finally from automobile to airplane have repeatedly reduced the number and enlarged the sizes of areas of urban
133
dominance, thus altering the entire structure of the hierarchical system of cities (see also Ogburn et al. 1946). The unanticipated consequences of the more subtle aspects of transportation may be equally significant. In the United States the first telling blow against segregation occurred when the federal government used its reserved right to control interstate commerce as license to end segregated seating and service in all facilities employed in such movement. On the international level, national dependencies on international trade and travel have produced cooperative agreements and discourse on many transportation problems between otherwise hostile governments. This brief scanning of the many diverse consequences of transportation systems only suggests how widely transportation infiltrates almost all aspects of social life. In so doing, it clarifies the repeated convergence of interest in transportation among professionals in all the social sciences. JOEL SMITH [See also CENTRAL PLACE; CITY, articles on METROPOLITAN GOVERNMENT and On COMPARATIVE URBAN STRUCTURE; PLANNING, SOCIAL, article On REGIONAL AND URBAN PLANNING; REGIONAL SCIENCE; SPATIAL ECONOMICS.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
ALONSO, WILLIAM 1964 Location and Land Use: Toward a General Theory of Land Rent. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. BARTHOLOMEW, HARLAND 1955 Land Uses in American Cities. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. BAUER, JOHN; and COSTELLO, PETER 1950 Transit Modernization and Street Traffic Control: A Program of Municipal Responsibility and Administration. Chicago: Public Administration Service. BREESE, GERALD W. 1949 The Daytime Population of the Central Business District of Chicago: With Particular Reference to the Factor of Transportation. Univ. of Chicago Press. BREW, JOHN O. 1950 The Highway and the Anthropologist. Pages 3-9 in Jean Labatut and Wheaton J. Lane (editors), Highways in Our National Life: A Symposium. Princeton Univ. Press. CHILDE, V. GORDON (1942) 1960 What Happened in History. Rev. ed. Baltimore: Penguin. CHINITZ, BENJAMIN 1960 Freight and the Metropolis: The Impact of America's Transport Revolutions on the New York Region. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. CHURCHMAN, CHARLES W.; ACKOFF, RUSSELL L.; and ARNOFF, E. LEONARD (1957) 1961 Introduction to Operations Research. New York: Wiley. COOLEY, CHARLES H. (1894) 1930 The Theory of Transportation. Pages 15-118 in Charles H. Cooley, Sociological Theory and Social Research, Being the Selected Papers of Charles Horton Cooley. With an introduction and notes by Robert Cooley Angell. New York: Holt.
134
TRANSPORTATION: Economic Aspects
COTTRELL, W. F. 1951 Death by Dieselization: A Case Study in the Reaction to Technological Change. American Sociological Review 16:358-365. ELIAS, C. E. JR.; GILLIES, JAMES; and RIEMER, SVEND (editors) 1964 Metropolis: Values in Conflict. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth. FERBER, ROBERT; and VERDOORN, P. J. 1962 Research Methods in Economics and Business, New York: Macmillan. FIREY, WALTER I. 1945 Sentiment and Symbolism as Ecological Variables. American Sociological Review 10:140-148. FOLEY, DONALD L. 1954 Urban Daytime Population: A Field for Demographic-Ecological Analysis. Social Forces 32:323-330. GARRISON, WILLIAM L. 1960 Connectivity of the Interstate Highway System. Regional Science Association, Papers and Proceedings 6:121-137. GILMORE, HARLAN W. 1953 Transportation and the Growth of Cities. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. GOTTMANN, JEAN (1961)1964 Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press. GREAT BRITAIN, MINISTRY OF TRANSPORT 1963 Traffic in Towns: A Study of the Long-term Problems of Traffic in Urban Areas. London: H.M. Stationery Office. GREER, SCOTT 1961 Traffic, Transportation, and Problems of the Metropolis. Pages 605-650 in Robert K. Merton and Robert A. Nisbet (editors), Contemporary Social Problems. New York: Harcourt. HAGGETT, PETER 1965 Locational Analysis in Human Geography. New York: St. Martins. ISARD, WALTER 1956 Location and Space-economy: A General Theory Relating to Industrial Location, Market Areas, Trade and Urban Structure. Cambridge, Mass.: Technology Press of M.I.T.; New York: Wiley. KAIN, JOHN F. 1962 The Journey-to-work as a Determinant of Residential Location. Regional Science Association, Papers and Proceedings 9:137-160. KANSKY, K. J. 1963 Structure of Transportation Networks: Relationships Between Network Geometry and Regional Characteristics. University of Chicago, Department of Geography, Research Paper No. 84. Univ. of Chicago Press. LABATUT, JEAN; and LANE, WHEATON J. (editors) 1950 Highways in Our National Life: A Symposium. Princeton Univ. Press. LANG, A. SCHEFFER; and SOBERMAN, RICHARD M. 1964 Urban Rail Transit: Its Economics and Technology. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press. LANSING, JOHN B.; and MUELLER, EVA 1964 Residential Location and Urban Mobility. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan, Institute for Social Research, Survey Research Center. LEVIN, DAVID R. 1950 The Permanence of the Right of Way in a Changing Environment. Pages 281-289 in Jean Labatut and Wheaton J. Lane (editors), Highways in Our National Life: A Symposium. Princeton Univ. Press. LIEPMANN, KATE K. (1944) 1945 The Journey to Work: Its Significance for Industrial and Community Life. London: Routledge. MAYER, HAROLD M. 1944 Localization of Railway Facilities in Metropolitan Centers as Typified by Chicago. Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics 20:299315.
MEYER, JOHN R. et al. (1959) 1964 The Economics of Competition in the Transportation Industries. Harvard Economic Studies, Vol. 107. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. MITCHELL, ROBERT B.; and RAPKIN, CHESTER 1954 Urban Traffic: A Function of Land Use. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, TRANSPORTATION CENTER 1964 Sources of Information in Transportation. Evanston, 111.: Northwestern Univ. Press. -» An extensive bibliography, particularly helpful in identifying important nongovernmental sources of transportation statistics. O'DELL, ANDREW C. 1956 Railways and Geography. London: Hutchinson's University Library. OGBURN, WILLIAM F. 1946 Inventions of Local Transportation and the Patterns of Cities. Social Forces 24:373-379. OGBURN, WILLIAM F.; ADAMS, JEAN L.; GILFILLAN, S. C. 1946 The Social Effects of Aviation. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. SMITH, JOEL 1959 Some Social Aspects of Mass Transit in Selected American Cities. Institute for Community Development and Services, Special Research Monograph No. 1. East Lansing: Michigan State University. TAAFFE, EDWARD J. 1956 Air Transportation and United States Urban Distribution. Geographical Review 46: 219-238. U.S. ADVISORY COMMISSION ON INTERGOVERNMENTAL RELATIONS 1961 Intergovernmental Responsibilities for Mass Transportation Facilities and Services in Metropolitan Areas: Commission Report. Washington: Government Printing Office. U.S. CONGRESS, SENATE COMMITTEE ON COMMERCE 1961 National Transportation Policy. 87th Congress, 1st Session, Senate Report 445. Washington: Government Printing Office. -» Report of the Committee on Commerce by its study group on transportation policies in the United States. U.S. CONGRESS, SENATE COMMITTEE ON COMMERCE 1962 Urban Mass Transportation: Hearings. 87th Congress, 2d Session. Washington: Government Printing Office. WINGO, LOWDON JR. 1961 Transportation and Urban Land. Washington: Resources for the Future. WOLFE, ROY I. 1963 Transportation and Politics. Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand. II ECONOMIC ASPECTS
A most salient economic characteristic of transportation throughout the world is that the provision of transportation services is almost invariably a matter of substantial public concern. In the United States this is reflected by the fact, among others, that transportation was the first industry to be subjected to formal government regulation and is still probably the most stringently regulated industry within the American economy. In the rest of the world the more direct approach of outright government ownership often has been adopted. Government ownership is, in fact, more the rule than the exception in rail and airline operations outside the United States.
TRANSPORTATION: Economic Aspects The distinction between nationalized and regulated transportation industries, however, can easily be overemphasized. It is remarkable, in fact, how similar the public complaints about transportation difficulties are in western Europe, with heavily nationalized transportation industries, and the United States, with no government ownership. The pronouncements by government officials, the comments by financial pundits, and the critiques made in the business press are strikingly similar under the different sets of circumstances. In a sense this is not too surprising. Obviously, regulation and government ownership are somewhat interchangeable devices for achieving public goals or aspirations. Indeed, it is surely significant that the United States, which has more formal government regulation of almost all business activities and requires considerably more exposure of private business affairs to public scrutiny than almost any other country, is also less prone to desire public ownership of economic facilities. [See NATIONALIZATION; REGULATION OF INDUSTRY.] The similarities of transportation problems in different parts of the world also derive from the simple fact that the same basic factors almost invariably influence transportation economics and policy, and these influences are essentially invariant whether the industry is nationalized or privately owned. They are, moreover, at work in all modes of transportation to a greater or lesser degree. Accordingly, understanding and devising appropriate policy solutions for transportation problems under almost any circumstances involve analyzing the effects of these fundamental influences. Essentiality. Probably the most important overall consideration is the idea that there is something inherently essential about transport services. This essentiality has been expressed in many different ways. In newly industrializing societies, for example, transportation is spoken of as being part of the "infrastructure" that is prerequisite to proper industrial and economic development [see CAPITAL, SOCIAL OVERHEAD]. In the more advanced parts of the world the concept of social need or social service is often invoked in connection with transportation. In both cases the notion is, simply, that transportation is somehow more basic to the proper conduct of economic and social affairs than are most other activities. The logic of this special concern with transportation derives from the circumstance that if transportation services are suspended, it is usually difficult to conduct other activities. As well as intrinsic essentiality, this reflects that transportation is a service and therefore not storable. Indeed, the
135
argument can legitimately be made that there are many other needs that are almost equally essential to society but, since they are storable, their suspension is not so immediately damaging. In short, it is the fact that transportation is both a service and essential that brings it to the special attention of governments. In this sense, transportation is in a special category shared by only a few other economic activities, such as the provision of medical services and the public utilities that supply gas and electricity. Transportation is, of course, also an important economic activity in and of itself. Establishing precise estimates of the volume of expenditures for transportation is difficult in most Western economies, mainly because so much of it is conducted by very small private concerns or by business firms as an adjunct to their principal manufacturing or commercial activities. Such undertakings are difficult to reflect in national income accounts and statistics. However, making duly rough allowances and ignoring expenditures made on private automobile transportation, it would appear that the provision of transportation services consumes somewhere between 5 and 10 per cent of gross national product in most advanced industrialized countries. Add in the amounts spent on private automobile transportation, and these figures would be considerably larger, particularly in the United States; and, needless to say, every year this private automobile expenditure has tended to increase in most Western countries. In less developed countries transport investments can account for 40 per cent or more of the total public investment budget. The problem of peak demand. A dominant technological and economic feature of most transportation systems is that their service capacities are fully utilized only a small fraction of the total time that they must usually be available. Rush hours or peak periods normally set the pattern for the whole transportation system. Capacity is designed or engineered to meet these peak demands; and it is this characteristic, more than any other, that usually establishes basic boundaries to possible economies of operation in transportation. Unbalanced use of capacity is most obvious in urban passenger transportation systems that often receive well over 50 per cent of their use during only 25 or 30 of the 168 hours in the week. While not quite so apparent, this is almost equally true of most other transportation activities. For example, intercity passenger travel tends to increase significantly in holiday or vacation periods. Freight operations also display pronounced "peaking." For example, agricultural products generally
136
TRANSPORTATION: Economic Aspects
tend to move in greatest volume shortly after harvest, and harvests are not spread uniformly throughout the year even in a large continental country like the United States, which has a rather wide range of climatic conditions. Timber and forest product shipments are subject to much the same set of considerations, and climate also plays a significant role in clustering nonagricultural bulk shipments of such commodities as coal and iron and other ores. Even general merchandise shipments have reasonably pronounced seasonal characteristics. For obvious reasons merchandise movements tend to precede peak sales periods, and Americans and Europeans confine a very considerable amount of their shopping activity to the months just before Christmas, Easter, and the return to school. Similarly, many important lines of industrial production tend to take place only in certain months of the year, with an accompanying unevenness in the demands they place on transportation of material inputs and finished product outputs. Furthermore, even if production activity is dispersed over the year in a reasonably uniform fashion, general merchandise shippers, as every rail and truck traffic manager knows, often want to send their loads out in the evening, shortly after the conventional workday is finished, and expect it to arrive, even at somewhat distant points, early the next morning, before work begins. One result, of course, is to overload carriers' merchandise handling facilities in the early evening and morning hours. Solutions. Imbalances are not difficult to handle, of course, if the peaks occur at different times of the year and if the same equipment can be used for meeting different demands. While transportation operators are constantly searching for ways to balance their operations, solutions are rarely discoverable in sufficient measure to completely eliminate all peaking problems. Furthermore, they can seldom be eliminated without paying a price in the form of higher operating costs. Specifically, equipment with more uses usually has performance characteristics inferior to that which is highly specialized. The tendency, in fact, under modern conditions of considerable competition between different modes of transportation, is toward greater use of specialized equipment to reduce costs and, even more importantly in many instances, to improve service. Any device that would permit storage or discretionary postponement of transport services would, of course, help ameliorate demand imbalances. Indeed, it is this very factor of nonstorability, typical of all services, that gives rise to the inability to utilize available transport capacity more effectively. Storability of transportation, however, is not
completely impossible but, rather, is a matter of degree. For example, larger manufacturing and retail inventories are one obvious method of storing freight transportation. Similarly, any act that can induce people to travel before or after peak demands is one way of "storing" passenger travel. In fact, any device that increases off-peak or decreases on-peak use of a transport system often will be economically beneficial. One obvious way of attempting to correct or eliminate imbalance by economic methods is to charge different rates for use of a transport facility in different seasons or at different times of the day, that is, to practice "price discrimination." For example, persons using urban transit during commuter rush hours might be charged discouragingly high rates, while business was encouraged by lower fares during the slack daytime hours, say from 9 A.M. to 4 P.M. (Urban transit is, incidentally, a splendid example of the situation, so common in passenger transportation, in which the demand peaking problem is intensified by the fact that it is usually impossible or uneconomic to curtail services severely during all off-peak periods, so that extra operating and capital costs are created by the bunching of demands.) It is probably politically unrealistic, though, to think that price discrimination can be instituted in many situations where no historical pattern of price discrimination has been established. Furthermore, there are often serious administrative problems involved in using price discrimination. It is also not always obvious that a price reduction in off-peak periods will bring in enough new business to offset losses caused by charging lower fares for already existing off-peak travel. Technological means of fitting available capacity more closely to demands can often be implemented at surprisingly little cost in either capital or performance characteristics. For example, the pronounced peaking of some urban commuter traffic suggests that many new urban throughways should be designed to include reversible lanes. Another excellent example of a technological device for improving capacity utilization is the use of deflatable neoprene bags for converting truck trailers or rail boxcars to tank trucks or tank cars. In general, an important implication of traffic peaking is that any decision on what constitutes the most efficient or economical form of transportation will depend heavily on the uses to which the facility can be put during off-peak periods. For example, a major economic disadvantage of urban rail rapid transit is that it usually has few alternative off-peak uses. By contrast, an urban highway is likely to be heavily used by noncommuting traf-
TRANSPORTATION: Economic Aspects fie during off-peak hours. Another important implication of peaking is that it puts a premium on being able to adapt service offerings to needs or demands. In this connection, ubiquity, flexibility, and a small basic unit of operation are advantageous. Thus, the commercial bus with unit loads of about 50 passengers and airplanes with between 50 and 150 seats clearly have a divisibility advantage over rail passenger operations, which normally are uneconomic for loads much under 200. Both the bus and the airline have, moreover, greater geographic coverage than rail does. The net effect is much greater adaptability in tailoring capacity provided to capacity needed. Similarly, much of any truck advantage over rail boxcar in the moving of general merchandise results from the greater coverage and divisibility of truck operations, which permit provision of a better quality of service at a lower cost at many less central points. Over-all systems. Another basic tenet of transportation economics is that every form of transportation has certain inherent technological and economic advantages and disadvantages, so it is a very rare situation in which it can be said that one transportation form is uniquely superior to all others. Because of the complexities of integrating different technologies into a cohesive entity, designing the most efficient over-all system usually is considerably more complex than simply identifying and adding together the most efficient techniques for performing each subfunction; that is, the advantages of greater efficiency in performing a particular function can often be dissipated in high costs of integration into a complete system. (Another important implication is that cost-finding procedures used in the United States by transport regulatory agencies and courts reviewing regulatory proceedings are almost invariably oversimplified, since they rarely look at the transport function as a complete system when making cost comparisons.) Among the more important considerations in designing an efficient over-all transport and distribution system are (1) the total volume of traffic to be carried; (2) the geographic distribution or dispersion of traffic over points of origin and termination; and (3) the rate of technological change or development expected in the near future. The volume and dispersion questions arise because, as already noted, different transport systems differ sharply in their divisibility, flexibility, and geographic coverage. These differences are functions of several considerations. For example, a rail system is generally considered (not always with full justification) to involve a relatively large overhead investment in highly specialized and relatively indivisible capital equipment, while com-
13 7
mercial highway transport does not (at least not on private account, because the highway investments are made by public agencies). The larger the volume of business, therefore, the more likely it is that rail installations can spread their capital costs thinly enough so as not to make them unduly burdensome. Moreover, once rail overhead costs fall below those of competitive technologies, a rail system is usually the more efficient because its direct operating costs per unit of service provided are usually somewhat below the comparable costs of other systems (though not nearly as far below, especially if service considerations are held constant, as is often believed). The rail operating-cost advantage accrues mainly from the fact that rail requires less labor per unit of transportation service performed than do most other forms of carriage. However, this labor advantage is found only in the performance of actual line-hauls—that is, between geographic points—ignoring the costs of getting the load onto and off the vehicle. In fact, loading and unloading usually will be at least as expensive by rail as by other modes, and often more expensive. To be precise, rail uses a good deal of capital and relatively little labor per unit of linehaul output of transport services and tends to be relatively inefficient in originating and terminating shipments. An important consequence is that in areas of extremely high traffic density, rail usually will have an efficiency advantage as long as relatively long hauls must be made. On the other hand, with shortdistance shipments the cost advantage of rail in line hauling may be offset by a cost disadvantage in loading and unloading. Expectations about technological change influence choices between different forms of transportation because the different modes usually use capital equipment of different durability. Thus, if one extrapolates a rapid development of new technology, less durable investments will be favored, everything else being equal. In general, the more specialized and capital-intensive rail technologies usually involve more durable capital equipment than do other transportation systems. It is difficult, of course, to know with any degree of accuracy what the future holds. However, it should be noted that if all other considerations are about equal— e.g., operating and overhead costs—then the less durable investment provides more room for maneuver or adaptation if the future will be characterized by substantial improvements in transportation technology. In sum, good systems designs in transportation are not readily identifiable and, above all, are impossible on the basis of isolated comparisons be-
138
TRANSPORTATION: Economic Aspects
tween different system components. Nor are simple static comparisons based on rigidly fixed and unimaginative assumptions about technological capabilities likely to be productive of the best results. In particular, volume and geographic dispersion must be considered in system design, because they crucially influence the scale of operations possible at particular geographic points and the relative weights to be placed on different cost characteristics. While general principles can be stated fairly easily, actually finding the best blend of different transportation technologies to serve a particular purpose at a particular point in time is likely to be a highly complicated task, and almost invariably must be based upon some uncertain forecasts about the future. Perhaps the only reasonably certain factor is that the best scheme usually will involve synthesizing some elements of different technologies and rarely will comprehend the application of one specific or pure technology to an entire transportation problem. Subsidization. A third fundamental of transportation economics is that the operation of almost any transportation system will involve subsidizing some customers at the expense of others; that is, some customers will pay less than the costs (either long-run incremental or full) of the services that they consume while others will pay substantially more. Such an outcome is an almost inevitable result of the complexities of determining costs of the wide diversity of services normally offered in most transportation operations, and of the administrative difficulties associated with any effort to apply different charges to every individual customer. The fact that many transportation services are considered, rightly or wrongly, as "socially necessary" and therefore potentially as justifying government subsidy only heightens these tendencies. Informal "cross-subsidization" of the socially desired services by charging more than costs for other services is often considered politically more expedient than direct government subsidy. However, direct government subsidies are occasionally used, as with local service airlines and many urban transit services in the United States, and they are an obvious method of subsidizing one transport activity without recourse to charging substantially more than costs for another. Whether direct government subsidy or crosssubsidies are used, the net result of conducting some transport activities at a loss is, usually, an income transfer from one group in society to another. Income redistributions effected by government action are, of course, not uncommon in democratic or, for that matter, in other societies.
In democratic societies, though, decisions to make income transfers are generally considered the subject for the fullest sort of political consideration or public discussion. It is therefore highly pertinent that income transfers effected through transportation operations are seldom even recognized or defined, let alone submitted to decision by normal political processes. All too often such income transfers tend to be the rather capricious and accidental effect of the day-to-day workings and historical patterns of development of the transportation system. Obviously, this is particularly true of situations where cross-subsidies within transportation operations occur. However, the same is true to only a slightly lesser degree in most instances of direct government subsidy. These have usually developed in a piecemeal fashion over time and very often are given to a transport system as an entity, with only vague recognition of the exact purposes for which they are intended. Furthermore, because direct subsidies historically have developed mainly after cross-subsidy schemes have failed, the direct subsidies are normally superimposed on an existing and confused scheme of cross-subsidies. In the United States there are several identifiable examples of income transfer attributable to transportation functions. Probably the most important quantitatively is that people living in rural locations and using lightly traveled highways, railroads, and airlines almost always pay less than the full cost of the services they utilize, with the difference being financed by returns above costs on operations between or within large urban centers. For example, short-distance passengers on local service commercial airlines are almost invariably transported at a loss, with the subsidy being rendered either directly by government or indirectly from earnings on the carriage of passengers traveling longer distances. From a purely commercial view, moreover, urban highways in and around the major cities of most states tend to be the "breadwinning investments" that finance most state highway departments, in the sense that state gasoline and other highway user charges realized from travel over urban highways far exceed the capital and maintenance costs on such facilities; the contrary is usually true of rural secondary roads. Many other examples could be cited of income transfers that are effected by transport operations. Obviously, to a large extent these transfers are a reflection of the fact that transportation produces a very large variety of slightly differentiated outputs, many of which are by-products of other operations. Making an accurate assessment of the costs of rendering these many different services, and
TRANSPORTATION: Economic Aspects therefore of taxes and transfers effected by them, would be extremely difficult. Even identifying all transfers would be a quite complex chore. Even without definitive information, however, it seems highly improbable that there is a particular logic or pattern to these income transfers. For example, it might be considered comforting if it could be proved that transportation operations result in a transfer of income from the rich to the poor on the widely accepted political premise that such transfers are advantageous in a democratic society. Such simple solace is difficult to justify, however, because many of the income transfers that can be identified from transportation operations actually result in a quite contrary redistribution. For instance, rail commuters into large cities sometimes do not pay even the direct operating costs of the services that they consume, and they normally represent at least a slightly above-average group of income recipients in their societies. There are, of course, probably some income transfers effected by transport operations that are progressive in character. Furthermore, some regressive transfers may be incidental to achieving other socially desired ends, such as bringing geographically isolated areas into closer contact with the rest of the nation. Still, more explicit treatment and recognition might be afforded to these transfers and their relationship to social objectives. Quality of service. A fourth basic characteristic of transportation economics, actually implicit in the preceding discussion, is that defining a product or service provided by transportation agencies is an exceedingly difficult matter, involving comparison of several different and often incommensurate qualities or dimensions of service. This holds, moreover, both when dealing in inanimate items such as freight cargo and when considering the highly animate human cargo involved in passenger transportation. Overlooking this factor of product or service differentiation is one of the most common fallacies to be found in transportation analyses. For example, railroad traffic managers in virtually all parts of the world have been prone to ignore the fact that rail transportation of general merchandise usually differs substantially in several important service characteristics from truck transportation. This, in turn, has led them into the very serious error of thinking that they could compete with truck transportation on a simple basis of rate parity. Under a regime of equal rates for rail and truck transportation, the almost inevitable result is a steady erosion of traffic away from rail to highways because several important cost savings are
13 9
effected by the better service provided by highway transport. Truck operators have been quick to recognize their service advantage and have been only too willing to set their rates equal to rail rates as long as the rail rates were above the truckers' relevant costs. The result has been aptly described as the holding of a "rail rate umbrella" over the competing truck rates; the "rate umbrella," of course, protects truckers against railroad competition. The fallacy of ignoring service differentials also bedevils discussion of urban transportation. Specifically, much has been made of the fact that several forms of public transit, particularly rail transit, are cheaper than private automobile transportation in urban areas. From this observation, the conclusion has commonly been derived that individuals who use private automobiles as a form of urban transportation are obviously foolish and have not really understood the price that they are paying for insisting on the use of their cars. Rarely, though, are these comparisons of public and private urban transportation costs adorned by any accompanying comparison of the relative qualities of the different transportation modes. Absent is any mention of such factors as relative schedule flexibility, the degree to which different modes will provide a complete door-to-door service, the comparative comforts and privacy of private and public transportation, and the speed with which different modes can complete an entire commuter trip. These omissions are all the more perverse because the rapid spread of automobile ownership throughout the Western world, despite the substantial costs involved, would seem to be explainable only in terms of widespread indulgence of conspicuous consumption or of rational pursuit of a superior transportation service. While conspicuous consumption has probably played a role, it seems highly doubtful that it can provide a complete explanation of the popularity of automobile ownership or justify the costs of such ownership to the large number of consumers now in possession of such vehicles. The rise of the commercial airliner in supplantation of the railroad is also explicable partly in terms of service improvements. The airliner obviously has a substantial speed and often a comfort advantage over rail. These qualities apparently are highly valued by the business traveler, who constitutes a remarkably large percentage of the market for first-class intercity public passenger transportation. Several important quality dimensions can also be identified in freight services. Among the more important are speed, gentleness (in the sense of limited damage while en route), the size of the
140
TRANSPORTATION: Commutation
shipment that can be conveniently accommodated, and the timing of departures and arrivals. Service performances in freight transportation, in very large measure, can be translated into rather specific cost savings in other parts of the production or distribution process. For example, greater speed and smaller unit sizes for each shipment are desirable because normally they will effect a reduction in the cost of holding inventories. Gentleness quite obviously has favorable effects on insurance, packing, and related costs. Proper timing of arrivals and departures can be advantageous by permitting a reduction in inventory, warehousing, and production labor costs. In sum, several subtle interrelationships are observable between different transportation service characteristics and ability to perform or effect cost savings in other parts of the production processes. Their existence re-emphasizes the importance of analyzing transportation characteristics in a broad systems approach or context. The essential advantage of superior transport service is that it permits modifications elsewhere, in patterns of living, production, and distribution, that either reduce economic costs or directly increase the satisfactions of individual consumers. JOHN R. MEYER [See also PRICES, article on PRICING POLICIES; REGULATION OF INDUSTRY.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
BECKMANN, MARTIN J.; McGuiRE, C. B.; and WINSTEN, CHRISTOPHER B. 1956 Studies in the Economics of Transportation. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. CAVES, RICHARD E. 1962 Air Transport and Its Regulators: An Industry Study. Harvard Economic Studies, Vol. 120. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. CHERINGTON, PAUL W. 1958 Airline Price Policy: A Study of Domestic Airline Passenger Fares. Boston: Harvard Univ., Graduate School of Business Administration. COOKENBOO, LESLIE JR. 1955 Crude Oil Pipe Lines and Competition in the Oil Industry. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. BEARING, CHARLES L.; and OWEN, WILFRED 1949 National Transportation Policy. Washington: Brookings Institution. FERGUSON, ALLEN R. et al. 1961 The Economic Value of the United States Merchant Marine. Evanston, 111.: Northwestern Univ., Transportation Center. FROMM, GARY (editor) 1965 Transport Investment and Economic Development. Washington: Brookings Institution, Transport Research Program. KUHN, TILLO E. 1962 Public Enterprise Economics and Transport Problems. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press. MEYER, JOHN R. et al. (1959) 1964 The Economics of Competition in the Transportation Industries. Harvard Economic Studies, Vol. 107. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press.
MEYER, JOHN R. et al. 1965 The Urban Transportation Problem. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. OWEN, WILFRED (1956) 1966 The Metropolitan Transportation Problem. Rev. ed. Washington: Brookings Institution. PEGRUM, DUDLEY F. 1963 Transportation: Economics and Public Policy. Homewood, 111.: Irwin. TAFF, CHARLES A. (1950) 1961 Commercial Motor Transportation. 3d ed. Homewood, 111.: Irwin. Transportation Economics: A Conference of the Universities—National Bureau Committee for Economic Research. 1965 New York: National Bureau of Economic Research. TROXEL, CHARLES E. 1955 Economics of Transport. New York: Rinehart. WALKER, GILBERT J. 1942 Road and Rail: An Enquiry Into the Economics of Competition and State Control. London: Allen & Unwin. WILSON, GEORGE W. 1962 Essays on Some Unsettled Questions in the Economics of Transportation. Bloomington: Indiana Univ., Bureau of Business Research. WINGO, LOWDON JR. 1961 Transportation and Urban Land. Washington: Resources for the Future. Ill COMMUTATION
Commutation refers primarily to the daily movement of the employed person between residence and workplace. The term is sometimes applied to daily trips between home and school and to weekend trips between city and country residences. More often, however, it is restricted to the journey to work, and this is the meaning adopted in the following discussion. When such work-related movements are viewed in the aggregate, they can be studied from two points of view: as dispersal from the dwelling area or as confluence at the workplace. These movements impart a distinct rhythm to the daily life of the modern urban community, displaying a temporal regularity that is closely related to the spatial order, or land use pattern. History. Commutation is essentially a modern development, dating from the rise of the factory system in the course of the industrial revolution. Earlier periods were characterized by a virtual identity between residence and workplace. The home was the place of work for the vast majority of the population engaged in handicraft production. It was only as agriculturalists traveled short distances each day between centrally located village residences and outlying fields that any regular daily movement took place. The industrial revolution brought about massive changes in land use, especially within cities. Centrally located workplaces, powered by inanimate forms of energy, came to employ dozens and even hundreds of workers. The decline of "cottage industries" and similar forms of production meant a sharp separation between home and work. At first,
TRANSPORTATION: Commutation the dwellings of workers were clustered near the factories in tenements and other high-density arrangements, and the trip to work was correspondingly short. With progressive improvements in intraurban transportation—including horse-drawn vehicles, electric trolleys, steam railways, and the automobile—the work trip lengthened substantially, and it became common for the worker to reside at a considerable distance from his job. The labor market thus came to be widely extended in space. In its contemporary form, the zone of commutation extends far beyond the limits of the modern city itself. Outlying places—"bedroom towns" or "dormitory cities"—contain large numbers of people who regularly commute to the central metropolis and other major employment centers. With the decline of agriculture as a source of employment in industrial nations, a large number of part-time farmers and other rural residents participate in the daily ebb and flow of commuters to the city. In addition to the main streams of worker traffic, flowing centripetally from peripheral areas and converging on the main center, there is considerable lateral motion, represented by crosscurrents of movement between outlying homes and workplaces. Modern transportation has meant that commutation has tended to supplement and even to supplant migration as a means of adjustment to shifts in the location of job opportunities in the more advanced countries. Commutation is virtually unknown in the nonindustrial nations of the world, although seasonal migration provides an approximate counterpart. The study of commutation. Commutation may be analyzed from the standpoint of the individual commuter, his family, or that of the community as a whole. Some attention has been directed toward the possibility of rather severe physiological and psychological strain upon individual employees who must travel long distances to work. The cost of transportation to work also enters into analyses of family budgets, where it often represents a major class of expenditures. Far more attention, however, has been focused upon commuting as an aggregate phenomenon, amenable to study and interpretation in the context of the community at large. Within sociology, human ecologists have accorded commuting the greatest amount of attention. The human ecologist regards the regular systole and diastole that it generates as prime evidence of a temporal order in the collective life of the modern community. Moreover, the human ecologist sees this circulatory movement as linked
141
to the general pattern of land uses in the community. The separation of home and work itself implies a rudimentary segregation of dissimilar land uses, and it is postulated that the continued functioning of the modern community as a whole requires the regular exchange of persons between spatially separate areas. The differentiated pattern of land uses is seen as expressive of the interdependence of the various specialized activities carried on within the community. Moreover, the maintenance of the existing equilibrium is assumed to depend upon the dynamic mechanism of recurrent movements, including commutation, but also to encompass other flows and exchanges of people, goods, and information. Commutation and land use. One can think of the modern urban community area as divided into three broad types of land use—industrial, commercial, and residential. From the standpoint of commuting to work, the first two types (industrial and commercial) reduce to one, for they are essentially attracting areas, with daily streams of commuters flowing into them. In contrast, residential areas are dispersing areas—reservoirs of manpower, so to speak—containing the dwelling places of those who go out to staff the enterprises located in other parts of the community. Thus the community can be abstractly viewed as containing only two types of areas—employing and residential—and workers flow between these areas in visible, measurable streams. One can examine these streams from the standpoint of their size (the sheer number of workers involved), their orientations (centripetal, centrifugal, lateral), and their composition (e.g., their occupational make-up). One can also examine the relationship between these broad characteristics of commuter movements and characteristics of communities. Finally, one can examine trends over time in various aspects of commuting. Sources of data. Because commutation is not a universal practice, most of what we know about it comes from studies recently conducted in modern urban-industrial countries. Not only is the phenomenon limited in time and space, but the very means for observing and measuring it are confined to a relative handful of nations. There are four general sources of information on commuting that have proved to be useful to social scientists interested in the problem: transit statistics, which include ticket sales and traffic counts on "mass" means of conveyance; employer records, which may be supplemented by special interviews at the workplace; origin-and-destination traffic surveys, wherein a sample population is queried concerning
142
TRANSPORTATION: Commutation
vehicular movements; and periodic censuses. Each of these sources of data exhibits peculiarities making it appropriate for a different type of inquiry. Moreover, not all sources are available for every geographic area, so that our knowledge is extremely uneven. For example, the 1960 census of population in the United States was the first in American census history to include questions on workplace and method of travel to work; in contrast, many European countries have included such items in their census schedules for some years. The German census of 1900 included a question on workplace. In general, the origin-and-destination survey is an American development, while European studies have placed far more reliance on employer records and transit statistics, supplemented by census tabulations. The European materials have been well summarized by Liepmann (1944); for that reason, the following summary draws more heavily upon American studies, for which no comparable synthesis exists. Research findings. Commuter trips appear to make up about 40 to 50 per cent of all daily vehicular movements in urban areas. More important, they are temporally concentrated; as a consequence, physical facilities must be designed to accommodate peak-hour loads, even though they may be underused at other times (Kain 1967). The amount of daily movement is such that the distribution of population over the entire urban area is constantly undergoing change. We have come to recognize important differences, for example, between daytime and nighttime population; the latter distribution is the one that is commonly recorded in a de jure census, but certain parts of the urban complex, and especially the central business district and other important employing centers, have daytime population concentrations far exceeding their residential populations. In general, commuter movements flow from widely dispersed residential areas to highly localized concentrations of jobs. Distance traveled. With respect to distance traveled, there appears to be a direct relationship between it and a person's socioeconomic status; in other words, the higher the social standing, the longer the journey to work. In part, this is a function of the spatial arrangement of residences by social class; the higher-status groups tend to live at the periphery (at least in larger urban areas), while groups of lower standing tend to occupy the center. Since many of the business and professional people in the upper strata work in the heart of the city, longer trips are required. But central workers seem to travel farther, regardless of their social
status, when compared with employees at other sites. Workers at outlying factories, offices, and stores tend to live much nearer their places of employment (Carroll 1952). Travel time. Despite the differences in the length of the worktrip, the time spent in travel seems to be roughly constant between the various socioeconomic strata and also appears to be about the same regardless of workplace. The explanation is not difficult. The wealthier persons, who travel greater distances, have faster and more flexible means of transportation at their disposal. As for central workers, they enjoy the benefit of mass transit systems which are strongly oriented toward the center; workers at dispersed locations throughout the remainder of the urban area presumably lose considerable time in lateral "cross-town" commuting, despite a shorter average worktrip. Method of travel. The above matters are considerably clarified when one examines differences in the method of travel employed by different subgroups within the population. By and large, the frequency of automobile travel increases with higher socioeconomic status; there is far less use of mass transit facilities by those in the very highest strata than by those who are less fortunately situated (Kain 1967). Commuting by automobile is not only faster, it is also far more flexible, in the sense that times of departure and arrival are more readily controlled and routes are less fixed. As we have noted, however, workers in central areas make heavier use of mass transit facilities. It appears that the frequency of service to the center offsets the time that would be otherwise sacrificed by the generally slower travel times offered by public transportation. Hence, the disadvantages of commuting by public carrier are largely avoided by central workers. Individual characteristics. There are other differentials that have been less firmly established by research. There appears to be a difference between the sexes, for example, with employed women (and especially married women) traveling shorter distances than males do. Women also tend to make greater use of public transportation; among employed couples owning only one car, the male tends to drive while the female depends upon mass transit facilities to get to and from work. When workers are compared according to their length of employment, those with higher seniority tend to live nearer, while newer employees travel greater distances. Similarly, younger workers tend to travel farther to work. Characteristics of communities. Another important class of differentials in commuting has to
TRANSPORTATION: Commutation do with characteristics of communities rather than characteristics of commuters. For example, there is a systematic and positive association between the length of the average worktrip and city size. Method of transportation also varies rather consistently with city size (Schnore 1962). Still another characteristic of the community that appears to be significant is its age. In particular, there is a striking difference between preautomobile and postautomobile cities. The character of transportation available in the era in which the city "grew up" seems to have implications for patterns of commutation years afterward. Older cities which entered their periods of florescence during the age of mass transit have well-established facilities, but newer cities tend not to install the expensive overhead and underground routes that are needed for efficient mass transportation. As a consequence, one finds 58 per cent of New York workers in 1960 commuting by public transportation, compared with 12 per cent in Los Angeles, a much "younger" city. Similarly, 83 per cent of the persons entering New York's central business district on a typical weekday in the early 1950s traveled by mass transit; in Los Angeles, this figure was 31 per cent. Such differences have an impact on family budgets; only 8.5 per cent of the total family expenditures in New York went for transportation in 1950, while families in Los Angeles devoted 16.4 per cent of their budgets to this purpose. The importance of the availability of mass transportation is seen in data on automobile registrations; in 1950, Los Angeles had 363 automobiles per 1,000 inhabitants of all ages, while the comparable figure was 152 for New York. Trends in commutation. Our knowledge of historical trends is rather imprecise because of the absence of bench-mark data for earlier years. Nevertheless, the following assertions can be made with some confidence. There has been a trend in the direction of longer journeys to work as cities have grown and spread; with this increasing commuting distance, the functional boundaries of the community have been extended considerably. Despite improvements in transportation, including greater speed and flexibility, much more time is now spent in commuting than in the past. In fact, the amount of time spent may roughly offset the shortening of the work day that has accompanied the progressive mechanization and rationalization of industry and commerce. The monetary costs of transportation have also increased over time, in the sense that a greater proportion of the family budget is devoted to this class of expenditures. Many costs are hidden, of course, and they elude exact calcu-
143
lation; in addition to the direct costs represented by transit fares and the purchase of vehicles, fuel, and insurance, the indirect costs (such as those incurred in building highway and parking facilities) have mounted enormously (Liepmann 1944). Finally, there is the well-known trend toward greater use of the private automobile in commuting. This is especially easy to document in the United States, where it has received a great deal of publicity, but apparently it is also under way in many other parts of the world where the costs of vehicles and fuels were formerly prohibitive. There is no urban-industrial nation in which automobile ownership has not risen dramatically since World War ii and where the commuting driver is not on the increase. Research needs. The major gaps in our knowledge concerning commutation stem from the limited coverage achieved in the studies that have been conducted. The pressing needs are for more comparative and historical investigations. In the following paragraphs, we will suggest some broad hypotheses and areas of research on which work is required. Historically, it appears that a shift in the orientation of commuter streams has occurred. One of the features that distinguishes the twentiethcentury metropolis from large cities of the past is the ease and rapidity of movement. However, even the smaller cities of the contemporary Western world enjoy the advanced transportation and communication facilities of the metropolis, and thus share this ease of movement. The unique features distinguishing movement in the metropolis appear merely to reflect the enhanced complexity associated with a system of interdependent nuclei. Thus physical movement in the metropolitan area has become much less simple with respect to direction and over-all orientation. In contrast with the simple in-and-out movement between center and periphery of earlier cities, the contemporary metropolitan area appears to have a very high proportion of lateral movements, in complicated crosscurrents and eddies. Commuting, in particular, is not merely a matter of centripetal and centrifugal flows morning and evening, but a confusing compound of variously oriented threads of traffic, superimposed upon the older and rudimentary center-oriented pattern. As the underlying patterns of functional and areal interdependence have become more complex, the manifest patterns of movement have become progressively less simple. As for comparative studies, there is one outstanding problem requiring research. We need to test the notion that older cities of Europe, together with
144
TREATIES
other urban areas in the non-Western world, tend to be organized in "quarters" within which people live and work, frequently walking to work and rarely leaving their own areas. This pattern is often contrasted with that in the United States, where people are thought to move about the entire urban area in the course of the average day. The actual contrasts may not be as sharp as is commonly supposed. With respect to the individual commuter, we know next to nothing. There are hypotheses in the literature to the effect that long-distance commuting results in higher rates of illness and absenteeism, but they have yet to be tested in rigorous fashion. Much more also needs to be known about the linkage between occupational and residential mobility, and their joint impact upon the length and character of the journey to work. Finally, we have very little sound knowledge concerning attitudes toward commuting. More generally, there is much to be done on the psychological aspects of commutation. LEO F. SCHNORE BIBLIOGRAPHY AHLMANN, HANS W. et al. 1934 Stockholms inre differentiering. Stadtskollegiets utlatanden och memorial, No. 51. Stockholm: Beckman. BREESE, GERALD W. 1949 The Daytime Population of the Central Business District of Chicago: With Particular Reference to the Factor of Transportation. Univ. of Chicago Press. CARROLL, J. DOUGLAS JR. 1952 The Relation of Homes to Work Places and the Spatial Patterns of Cities. Social Forces 30:271-282. CHOMBART DE LAUWE, PAUL H. et al. 1952 Paris et I'agglomeration parisienne. 2 vols. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. DUNCAN, BEVERLY 1957 Intra-urban Population Movement. Pages 297-309 in Paul K. Hatt and Albert J. Reiss, Jr. (editors), Cities and Society: The Revised Reader in Urban Sociology. 2d ed. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. FLAUS, LUCIEN 1953 Lieux de travail et zones d'habitation dans le Departement de la Seine. Journal de la Societe de Statistique de Paris 94:98-124. FOLEY, DONALD L. 1954 Urban Daytime Population: A Field for Demographic-Ecological Analysis. Social Forces 32:323-330. GERARD, ROY 1958 Commuting and the Labor Market Area. Journal of Regional Science I , no. 1:124-130. HAWLEY, AMOS H. 1950 Human Ecology: A Theory of Community Structure. New York: Ronald. HOLMBERG, STEN 1947 Stor-Stockholm: Dess uppkomst och kommunikationer. Stockholm: Stockholms Sparvager. KAIN, JOHN F. 1967 Urban Travel Behavior. Pages 161192 in Leo F. Schnore and Henry Fagin (editors), Urban Research and Policy Planning. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications. KANT, EDGAR 1957 Suburbanization, Urban Sprawl, and Commutation: Examples From Sweden. Pages 244-
309 in David Hannerberg et al. (editors), Migration in Sweden: A Symposium. Lund University Studies in Geography, Series B, No. 13. Lund (Sweden): Gleerup. K0BENHAVN
TRAFFICKKOMMISSIONEN
1949
Bolig—Ar-
bejdssted unders0gelse samt traffiktoelling i K0benhavn 1945. Copenhagen: Udgivet af Stadsingeni0rens Direktorat. LIEPMANN, KATE K. (1944) 1945 The Journey to Work: Its Significance for Industrial and Community Life. London: Routledge. LYNCH, JOHN T. 1944 Origin and Destination Surveys in Urban Areas. National Research Council, Highway Research Board, Proceedings 24:239-254. MACGREGOR, D. RONALD 1953 Daily Travel: A Study in Time and Distance Around Edinburgh. Scottish Geographical Magazine 69:117-127. MENZLER, F. A. A. 1952 An Estimate of the Day-time Population of London. Town Planning Institute, London, Journal 38:116-120. MITCHELL, ROBERT B.; and RAPKIN, CHESTER 1954 Urban Traffic: A Function of Land Use. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. OWEN, WILFRED (1956) 1966 The Metropolitan Transportation Problem. Rev. ed. Washington: Brookings Institution. Die Pendelwanderung zwischen Wohnung und Arbeitstatte in Hamburg 1950 und 1939. 1952 Hamburg, Statistisches Landesamt, Hamburg in Zahlen 37:425-444. SCAFF, ALVIN H. 1952 The Effect of Commuting on Participation in Community Organizations. American Sociological Revieiv 17:215-220. SCHNORE, LEO F. 1954 The Separation of Home and Work: A Problem for Human Ecology. Social Forces 32:336-343. SCHNORE, LEO F. 1960 Three Sources of Data on Commuting: Problems and Possibilities. Journal of the American Statistical Association 55:8-22. SCHNORE, LEO F. 1962 The Use of Public Transportation in Urban Areas. Traffic Quarterly 16:488-498. VAN DER HAEGEN, H. 1953 Les migrants alternants bruxellois. Societe Beige d'Etudes Geographiques (Brussels), Bulletin 22:441-449. WATANABE, YOSHIO 1953 The Urban Region of Sendai: A Study of the Urban Concentric Zoning in Its Actual Pattern in Japan. Tohoku Daigaku, Sendai, Japan, Science Reports, 7th Series 2:30-52. WINGO, LOWDON JR. 1961 Transportation and Urban Land. Washington: Resources for the Future.
TREATIES See INTERNATIONAL LEGISLATION.
TREITSCHKE, HEINRICH VON Heinrich von Treitschke (1834-1896), German historian and political publicist, was born in Dresden, the son of an army officer. He had planned a military career but was disqualified by an ear affliction that affected his hearing, and so he took up the study of political science and history instead. He also dabbled in poetry and playwriting and for a time thought of devoting himself to literary pursuits. His lectures and writings bear dis-
TREITSCHKE, HEINRICH VON tinct traces of the poet and dramatist, just as their militant spirit reflects his earlier interest in a soldier's career. Treitschke's interest in politics was first awakened when he was a high school student. Deeply disappointed by the failure of the revolution of 1848, he devoted much thought and study to the cause of German unification. As a student at the University of Bonn, he was influenced by his teacher Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann and by the writings of August Ludwig von Rochau, the creator of the concept of Realpolitik, and he came to the conclusion that unification could be achieved only by a combination of national enthusiasm and power and that Prussia alone could generate both. He became a contributor to, and later editor of, the Preussische Jahrbucher, a monthly dedicated to the Prussian-led unification of Germany. To the embarrassment of his family and at great risk to his academic career, he also advocated that cause after he had become Privatdozent at the University of Leipzig. Initially, Treitschke hoped that Prussia would win its role as leader of Germany at least partly through "moral conquests," and he objected strongly to the appointment of Bismarck as Prussian minister-president. But he became an ardent supporter of Bismarck after Prussia's victory over Denmark in 1864 had convinced him of the effectiveness of power politics. By then he had become assistant professor of political science at Freiburg (Breisgau). Forced to leave Freiburg at the outbreak of the Austro-Prussian war of 1866, he became professor of history at the University of Kiel and, later, at the universities of Heidelberg, in 1867, and Berlin, in 1874, receiving these appointments more because of his political views than his scholarly attainments. Treitschke was an eloquent and exciting teacher in spite of his growing deafness. In the early 1860s Treitschke had sided with the liberal supporters of German unification, but he had always been essentially conservative, especially in his social views. After unification (in 1871) he became increasingly conservative politically too. Elected a deputy to the Reichstag on the National Liberal ticket, he eventually broke with that party and ran as an independent; he later withdrew from politics altogether. He came to detest liberalism as the embodiment of economic interests; he fought the Roman Catholics during the Kulturkampf on the grounds that they were weakening the state with their insistence on civil and religious liberties; and he turned on the Jews because, in his view, they refused to become wholehearted Germans and injected a dangerous ma-
145
terialistic, unheroic element into the German mind. As one who had always felt that the country should be ruled by an elite of birth and education, Treitschke also fought violently against the political aspirations of the workers, embodied in the emerging Social Democratic party. To Treitschke, the only effective counterweight to these corrupting and demoralizing forces was a strong monarchy resting on a nonpartisan bureaucracy and a powerful army. The army's domestic function would be primarily educational; it would teach idealism, discipline, and dedication. The parliament, in addition to its legislative function, would guard the country against possible abuses by the bureaucracy, but its power of the purse would be severely curtailed. In his lectures and in his writing, Treitschke tried to fight selfishness and materialism. His famous course on politics (see 1897-1898), a "must" for students from all departments, extolled the state as the iron framework within which selfish interests are controlled, and he saw war as the great purifier of the nation. In his main work, the uncompleted History of Germany in the Nineteenth Century (1879-1894), he provided the nation with an inspirational guide to its past, describing Prussian determination and discipline as having triumphed over the egotism and complacency of the Austrians and South Germans. Treitschke was not unaware of moral and spiritual values, but in his preoccupation with national strength and self-discipline his view of the state as a moral community was overshadowed by his emphasis on its power. He thus implanted in his students a spirit of arrogant, uncouth nationalism, which he was the first to deplore when it became the dominant theme of German policy under William n. As the admired teacher of thousands of other teachers, judges, administrators, and politicians, Treitschke helped to mold the political and social atmosphere of Germany from the 1880s to the 1920s, as many of his students and readers— for example, Max Weber, Friedrich Meinecke, Heinrich Class, Admiral von Tirpitz, and Prince Bernhard von Biilow—have testified. He was not a direct spiritual ancestor of National Socialism, but by his stress on the need for authoritarianism and power he helped to make the nation receptive to Nazi ideas. Most of Treitschke's works are now interesting only as historical documents. His German History, however, is still read both for its literary value and, in parts at least, as an important source of scholarly information. ANDREAS DORPALEN
146
TRIALS
[For the historical context and subsequent development of Treitschke's ideas, see DICTATORSHIP; NATIONAL SOCIALISM; NATIONALISM.]
Traditional views. Evolutionary writers of the last century attempted to distinguish between tribal and modern society in terms of imputed differences in their legal and political institutions. MorWORKS BY TREITSCHKE gan (1877) saw tribal society as having social, (1865-1867) 1896-1897 Historische und politische Aufbut not political organization, a judgment echoed sdtze. 5th ed. 4 vols. Leipzig: Hirzel. (1874) 1897 Zehn Jahre deutscher Kampfe: Schriften by Sidgwick (1891) and some later authorities on zur Tagespolitik. 3d ed. 2 vols. Berlin: Reimer. -> politics. Both Morgan and Maine (1861) conVolume 1: Von 1865-1870. Volume 2: Von 1871trasted the territorial foundations of the modern 1879. The first edition had the subtitle 1865-1874. state with what they considered to be the kinship (1879-1894) 1915-1919 History of Germany in the Nineteenth Century. 7 vols. New York: McBride. -> First basis of tribal societies. Maine regarded tribal empublished in German. phasis on the status structure (ascribed through 1896 Deutsche Kampfe; neue Folge: Schriften zur Tagesbirth) to be dominant over relations of voluntary politik. Leipzig: Hirzel. contract that could be achieved by skill or effort. (1897-1898) 1916 Politics. 2 vols. London: Constable. -» From university lectures covering thirty years. HarThis assessment, of course, formed the basis for court published an abridged edition in 1963. the great legal historian's famous aphorism express(1913-1920) Heinrich von Treitschkes Briefe. 3 vols. in ing the transition from tribal to modern institu4. Edited by M. Cornicelius. Leipzig: Hirzel. tions in terms of the "movement of the progressive SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY societies" from status to contract. BUSSMANN, WALTER 1952 Treitschke: Sein Welt- und The remarkable advances that have been achieved Geschichtsbild. Gottingen: Musterschmidt. in the empirical study of tribal societies in recent BUSSMANN, WALTER 1954 Treitschke als Politiker. Hisyears make these judgments in many respects untorische Zeitschrift 177:249-279. tenable. It is true that no one seriously questions CURTIUS, FRIEDRICH 1900 Treitschkes Politik. Deutsche Rundschau 105:196-216. the importance of kinship organization in most DORPALEN, ANDREAS 1957 Heinrich von Treitschke. tribal societies, but the conclusion that this imNew Haven: Yale Univ. Press. plies the exclusion of territorial ties can no longer HAUSRATH, ADOLF (1901) 1914 Treitschke: His Docbe maintained. Almost all sedentary tribal societies trine of German Destiny and Internal Relations, Together With, a Study of His Life and Work. New York: have well-defined groupings based on common ocPutnam. -> First published in German. cupation of territory, and even where these are KOHN, HANS (1946) 1952 Prophets and Peoples. New lacking, kinship is not coterminous with the politiYork: Macmillan. cal cohesion of a tribe. LEIPPRAND, ERNST 1935 Heinrich von Treitschke im On the other hand, Maine's emphasis on the deutschen Geistesleben des 19. Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart (Germany): Kohlhammer. paucity of contractual relations in tribal society has been widely sustained, particularly by such anthropologists as Gluckman (1955, p. 28) and TRIALS See INTERNATIONAL CRIMES; JUDICIAL PROCESS; Schapera (1938), who have made fundamental LAW, article on THE SOCIOLOGY OF LAW; POLITICAL contributions to the study of tribal legal instituJUSTICE; PUNISHMENT. tions. Yet here much naturally turns on what is meant by "contract." Davy (1922), who seriously attacked the question, regarded status and contractual relations as inseparably intertwined in TRIBAL SOCIETY tribal society and saw what Maine took to be the In general usage, the word "tribe" is taken to complete replacement of the first by the second as denote a primary aggregate of peoples living in a a gradual process of separation and specialization. primitive or barbarous condition under a headman Evidence supporting this position may be cited or chief. The unnecessary moralistic overtones that from the pastoral Somali nomads of the Horn of this usage implies can be avoided or minimized by Africa, where contract is explicitly employed as a the use of the expression "tribal society," which political device for the purpose of supplementing, is to be preferred to such synonyms as "primitive curtailing, or defining the range of blood solidarity society" or "preliterate society." At the same time, (Lewis 1961, pp. 161 ff.). Even in the Lozi kingthe word "tribe" need not be discarded. Indeed, it dom of central Africa (Gluckman 1955), contrachas become a technical term denoting a territorially tual relations of a kind can be discerned, cloaked denned political unit, a usage that recalls the origithough they may be in the idiom of kinship. nal Latin use of the word for the political divisions It is evident, therefore, even from this brief or patrician orders of the Roman state. discussion, that neither contract nor territoriality
TRIBAL SOCIETY provide in themselves adequate criteria for distinguishing between tribal and modern society. Nor, indeed, is it easy to find any other acceptable criteria of this order. What is necessary is an entirely different approach, for it is not the presence or absence of particular principles of social grouping that is significant here, but the form, shape, and design of society itself. Characteristics of tribal society. While taking account of the implications of such homely synonyms as "simple society," "preindustrial society," or "folk society," a satisfactory characterization of tribal society must therefore concentrate upon criteria of form rather than of content. Here the most useful general criterion is that of "scale" (Wilson & Wilson 1945). Ideally, tribal societies are small in scale, are restricted in the spatial and temporal range of their social, legal, and political relations, and possess a morality, religion, and world view of corresponding dimensions. Characteristically, too, tribal languages are unwritten, and hence, the extent of communication both in time and space is inevitably narrow. At the same time, tribal societies exhibit a remarkable economy of design and have a compactness and self-sufficiency lacking in modern society. This is achieved by the close, and sometimes unilateral, connections that exist between tribal institutions or principles of social organization, and by the concentration of a multiplicity of social roles in the same social persons or offices. There is a corresponding unity and coherence in tribal values that are intimately related to social institutions and are endowed with an intensity characteristic of all "closed" systems of thought. Tribal societies are supremely ethnocentric. Economic relations are usually of the subsistence type, although trade and barter often extend outside the community. At the same time, economic differentiation and specialization are not developed, and by modern standards technological knowledge and environmental control remain restricted. Ideally, indeed, a position of socioeconomic equilibrium has been attained in relation to environmental conditions. In these circumstances social change tends to be on a limited scale, reproducing rather than drastically altering the existing order, and innovations are profoundly affected by the established institutions of society. Yet the isolation and unchangingness of tribal communities must not be exaggerated; above all, it must be remembered that knowledge of tribal life derives mainly from studies made at a particular point in time. Even where the history of a tribal society is not known with any certainty, the ebb
147
and flow of contact and influence between cultures is too widespread a phenomenon to be denied on the basis of negative evidence alone. As Forde (1934, pp. 466 ff.) very properly emphasized, the diffusion of technical, moral, and aesthetic ideas is something that all societies have experienced to some degree. Indeed, contact by either peaceful penetration or conquest, has, in many cases, wrought far-reaching, and often radical, changes in material techniques, values, and social institutions. Hence, if tribal societies are to be regarded as having achieved a state of balance with their physical and social surroundings, they must be understood to be in dynamic rather than static equilibrium. Only when these qualifications are accepted is "tribal society" a useful working concept that applies to a wide range of actual communities, existing as they do in reality in both time and space. The concept applies best to such small, relatively isolated and self-contained societies as the Trobriand Islanders of Melanesia (Malinowski 1922), the Tikopia (Firth 1936), and many peoples of the hinterlands of America and Africa, as for example, the Tallensi of Ghana (Fortes 1945; 1949). Many other traditional societies generally regarded as tribal conform less closely to the ideal type. There is, for instance, what might be described as a middle range of large centralized states, such as the east African Baganda (Richards 1960, pp. 41 ff.), whose population numbers well over a million; the central African state of Ruanda, with nearly two million people (Maquet 1961); the west African state of Nupe, with a population of almost half a million (Nadel 1942); and in southern Africa, the Zulu state, which in 1870 was similar in strength to Nupe (Gluckman 1940). The famous League of the Iroquois (Morgan 1851) presents another example of this type. In the degree and range of internal differentiation, especially in their political and legal institutions, these examples do not conform fully to the ideal conception of a tribal society. It is clear that the issue is not merely one of the degree of political and administrative centralization achieved, for there are many other tribal societies that lack these features and yet in terms of sheer numerical size assume the proportions of small nations. For example, both the Galla (Huntingford 1955) and the Somali (Lewis 1961) of northeast Africa have a population of about three million, and the Yoruba (Forde 1951), Hausa, and Ibo (Forde & Jones 1950) of west Africa are probably even more numerous. Other exceptions are encountered when one
148
TRIBAL SOCIETY
deals with much smaller, but equally uncentralized, tribal peoples who live in Arabia and in north, northeast, and west Africa. Through trade, the Muslim religion, and the partial use of the Arabic language, these communities participate in the world culture of Islam. In Asia, the Hindu world provides parallel instances of small societies which are culturally and linguistically distinct, but which participate through religion and the caste system in the macroculture and society of Hinduism (cf. Srinivas 1952; Dumont 1957). Although it is common practice to regard these communities as laterally organized tribal units in the vertical world of Hindu caste, here the closed horizons of tribal societies in the strict sense are patently absent. Similar reservations have to be made in the case of rural Chinese communities, although these share many tribal principles of organization. In these latter cases we are concerned with communities that belong emphatically to two worlds, where the category of tribal society overlaps with that of peasant society and, according to Redfield (1956), the "little tradition" in many respects partakes of the more inclusive "big tradition" in which it participates. The chief difficulty here is that of determining where the tribal community begins and ends. With the spread of modern values, of industrialization, and of urbanization, this problem of course is becoming almost universal, and in its urban aspects gives rise to the so-called phenomenon of "detribalization" discussed below. In the typically isolated and self-contained tribal society, however, there is a common awareness of social and cultural identity —a common set of values—and no dispute about the social frontiers of the community. But in the fluid conditions just described, this no longer applies. Instead, there is a lack of generally accepted, precisely defined limits to consciously recognized social and cultural identity. In these cases, the frontiers of cultural and social interaction are illdefined, shifting, and inconsistent (cf. Leach 1954). The concept "tribal society," therefore, although having general utility as an idealized type of society, is in no sense an absolute category. Some societies are merely more or less tribal than others. In the classification of societies according to their scale, "tribal society" can be regarded at most as a loosely bounded area at the opposite end of the continuum to that of "modern society." Typologies of tribal society. Various criteria have been adopted by different schools of anthropologists in the classification of tribal societies. For
the purpose of reconstructing historical connections, German and Austrian workers such as Schmidt and Koppers and their followers have classified societies according to the particular configuration of institutions, or Kulturkreise, which they incorporate. The theoretical premise is that peoples sharing the same cluster of institutions have a common origin, an assumption that has proved better founded when the cultural traits shared have belonged to the material rather than to the social sphere of organization. Attempts to correlate social and political institutions with types of tribal economy, usually in order to construct evolutionary scales of progress, have fared little better. Certain crude correlations undoubtedly exist between the extent of environmental control and scope of economic exploitation on the one hand, and the complexity and scale of juridical and political organization on the other. This has been elegantly demonstrated by Hobhouse, Wheeler, and Ginsberg (1915), But, in spite of this, there is no necessary and inevitable connection between particular social and political institutions, or clusters of them, and modes of livelihood and economy. Recent research in cultural and structural anthropology has consequently abandoned the holistic search for origins and has applied the comparative method to the functional analysis of institutions. The British school and its adherents, stimulated by the pioneering work of Fortes and Evans-Pritchard (1940), have devoted much attention to problems of political organization. These studies have shown equally how the same institutions may in one tribal society provide a basis for a complex administrative and governmental structure, while in another they are invested with different functions and provide only for ephemeral political cohesion without any formal positions of leadership or authority. More generally, this work has demonstrated how as political units increase in size (but not necessarily in population density) their internal organization inevitably becomes more complex. Among the politically diffuse Nuer of the Sudan, or among the equally equalitarian Somali nomads of northeast Africa, quite large communities may for short periods act as political entities. However, stable and concerted political unity requires a degree of centralized government and administrative specialization that these peoples traditionally lack. Here, moreover, there is often a separation between morality, or the system of values, and political cohesion. In the Somali case, for instance, the boundaries of traditional political unity stop short at the clan, although all clans share common value and
TRIBAL SOCIETY moral systems and recognize the same code of indemnification for wrongs. This concentration on the comparative functions of political institutions has greatly advanced the study of tribal societies and has led to a deepened understanding of the various institutional principles by which tribal cohesion is maintained. It is now clear, for example, that in many politically inchoate societies the threat of vengeance, rather than its execution, serves to maintain social order. In this manner the potential for violence activates the network of personal allegiances founded on residence and kinship, and thus affords a system of social control in the absence of government and courts of law. These inquiries have emphasized the significance of the counterbalancing forces in the elastic fabric of social relations, which in certain areas of all societies contribute to social stability and integration. Stripped of their particular cultural idiom, similar social processes can be seen to be at work in all human societies. One of the principal values of tribal studies is that in these alien, small-scale, and closely knit communities it is easier to perceive the mechanisms of cultural dynamics. "Tribe" as a technical term. The increasingly detailed functional analysis of tribal institutions has naturally entailed a reformulation of concepts. In English anthropology, although not always in America or on the Continent, the term "tribe" has acquired a restricted technical meaning. Usually the term now refers to the widest territorially denned, politically independent unit in a tribal society. It no longer refers to the culturally and ethnically distinct tribal society as a whole except where, as in such tribal states as Baganda or Ruanda, tribe and society coincide. Some tribal societies, therefore, consist of several tribes; others comprise a single tribe. But in both cases the emphasis of the definition is on territorially based political unity, an emphasis that reflects tribal realities. In truly nomadic societies, of course, where there are no proprietorial rights asserted over definite areas of land, tribes in this strict sense do not exist. Thus the introduction of the word "tribe" as a technical term makes possible a fuller and more accurate description of the nature of political cohesion within the tribe and facilitates the distinction between purely territorial loyalties and those founded on such other principles of association as kinship, clanship, or age-grouping. But, while it is always easy to describe the tribe in its territorial aspects, its political qualities are not always easily
149
defined, especially in tribes without chiefs or other formally installed rulers. Thus, in dealing with the Nuer of the Sudan, Evans-Pritchard (1940) found it necessary to define the tribe as the largest territorial unit within which the members of the tribe would unite against external aggression and settle their internal differences by arbitration. Tribalism and "detribalization." When tribesmen move out of their native society to join, however peripherally, a larger multitribal or plural society, the tribal identity that they carry with them is that of their tribal society as a whole, irrespective of whether or not it originally represented a single political unit. An interesting example is provided by the Luapula kingdom of Kazembe in central Africa studied by Cunnison (1960). Here peoples of various tribal origin have settled and owe common allegiance to the Lunda King Kazembe and yet also retain their external ties with their tribal homelands. There is a single multitribal Luapula political unit under Kazembe, a tribe; yet cultural, social, and political ties extend outside the kingdom from among its heterogeneous subjects. What is significant is the retention of original tribal links and their use as a principle of association within the kingdom as well as outside it, a situation that implies something more than dual citizenship. This purely tribal phenomenon, which is not restricted to central Africa, is analogous to the common situation today caused by the spread of urbanization and industry throughout the world and the increasing involvement of tribesmen in the new plural societies that result. Contrary to the deep-seated traditional view, many tribal societies do not disintegrate or lose their identity in these situations of contact or acculturation between widely diverse cultures. Indeed, as long as the traditional economy is not radically changed and the weight of foreign influence is not overwhelming, much of the traditional tribal culture and values persists and shows remarkable resilience in adapting to the new conditions. Tribal cohesion has, moreover, in most cases shown itself to be capable of surviving and even profiting from quite radical changes in political organization under colonial rule. Frequently indeed, and especially where the policy of indirect rule has been followed, colonial administration has buttressed and strengthened rather than weakened tribal identity. When tribal identity and cohesion persist outside towns, those tribesmen who move into the industrial areas in search of work do not necessarily become "detribalized." Recent studies, such as those
150
TRIBAL SOCIETY
of Mitchell (1956; 1960) and of Southall (1961) in Africa, reveal how inadequate this traditional evaluation has become. Especially where urban conditions are insecure, the tribal townsman maintains a foot in both town and country and is not unequivocally committed to urban society. Social, political, and property interests (particularly where land or livestock are involved) tie the townsman to his rural kinsmen, whom he helps to support with his new earnings. In turn, the effective maintenance of these ties with his rural kin guarantees that the townsman's place in his tribal social structure will be kept open for him. Thus, between tribal area and urban conglomeration a kind of social continuum is established. In the multitribal or plural society of the town itself, tribal identity is now enlarged to the limits of the individual's tribal society as a whole. It becomes a category of social interaction competing for the townsman's allegiance with other social categories, such as residential ties, class, and modern nationalism. Hence, what is carried forward into the mixed and often polyglot urban community with all its new values is not tribal allegiance at the level of "tribe" in the strict sense, but tribal institutions and patriotism on the wider scale. For the townsman, and also to an increasing extent for the tribesman who remains at home, the tribal way of life and system of values are now one institution among several that are variously opposed and conflicting. With these developments, the gap between the real situation and the ideal concept of tribal society grows even wider. But the concept will remain useful, not only for understanding the way in which tribal societies have changed and are changing in the modern world, but also as a theoretical construct in the comparative study of social systems and institutions. Even when all truly tribal communities have disappeared, the fact that under certain conditions certain combinations of institutions have provided the basis for a viable social system at some point in man's history is of the utmost significance to the student of society. No empirically sound general theory of society can be elaborated unless account is taken of every known form of man's existence in society. I. M. LEWIS [See also POLITICAL ANTHROPOLOGY, article on POLITICAL ORGANIZATION; STATELESS SOCIETY; VILLAGE.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
BEATTIE, J. H. M. 1964 Other Cultures: Aims, Methods and Achievements in Social Anthropology. London: Cohen & West; New York: Free Press.
BOHANNAN, PAUL; and DALTON, GEORGE (editors) 1962 Markets in Africa. Northwestern University Africa Studies, No. 9. Evanston, 111.: Northwestern Univ. Press. CUNNISON, IAN G. 1960 The Luapula Peoples of Northern Rhodesia: Custom and History in Tribal Politics. Manchester (England) Univ. Press. DAVY, GEORGES 1922 La foi juree. Paris: Alcan. DOUGLAS, MARY 1966 Purity and Danger: A Comparative Study of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge. DUMONT, L. 1957 Une sous-caste de I'Inde du Sud: Organisation sociale et religion de Pramalai Kallar. Paris: Mouton. EVANS-PRITCHARD, E. E. 1940 The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People. Oxford Univ. Press. FALLERS, LLOYD A. (editor) 1964 The King's Men: Leadership and Status in Buganda on the Eve of Independence. Oxford Univ. Press. FIRTH, RAYMOND (1936) 1957 We the Tikopia: A Sociological Study of Kinship in Polynesia. 2d ed. London: Allen & Unwin. -> A paperback edition was published in 1963 by Beacon. FORDE, C. DARYLL (1934) 1963 Habitat, Economy and Society: A Geographical Introduction to Ethnology. London: Methuen. FORDE, C. DARYLL 1951 The Yoruba-speaking Peoples of South-western Nigeria. Ethnographic Survey of Africa Series: Western Africa, Part 4. London: International African Institute. FORDE, C. DARYLL; and JONES, G. I. 1950 The Ibo and Ibibio-speaking Peoples of South Eastern Nigeria. Ethnographic Survey of Africa Series: Western Africa, Part 3. Oxford Univ. Press. FORTES, MEYER 1945 The Dynamics of Clanship Among the Tallensi: Being the First Part of an Analysis of the Social Structure of a Trans-Volta Tribe. Published for the International African Institute. Oxford Univ. Press. FORTES, MEYER 1949 The Web of Kinship Among the Tallensi: The Second Part of an Analysis of the Social Structure of a Trans-Volta Tribe. Published for the International African Institute. Oxford Univ. Press. FORTES, MEYER; and EVANS-PRITCHARD, E. E. (editors) (1940) 1958 African Political Systems. Oxford Univ. Press. GLUCKMAN, MAX 1940 The Kingdom of the Zulu of South Africa. Pages 25-55 in Meyer Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard (editors), African Political Systems. Published for the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures. Oxford Univ. Press. GLUCKMAN, MAX 1955 The Judicial Process Among the Barotse of Northern Rhodesia. Manchester (England) Univ. Press; Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. GLUCKMAN, MAX 1965 Politics, Law and Ritual in Tribal Society. Oxford: Blackwell. HERSKOVITS, MELVILLE J. 1938 Dahomey: An Ancient West African Kingdom. 2 vols. New York: Augustin. HOBHOUSE, LEONARD T.; WHEELER, G. C.; and GINSBERG, M. (1915) 1930 The Material Culture and Social Institutions of the Simpler Peoples: An Essay in Correlation. London School of Economics and Political Science, Monographs on Sociology, No. 3. London: Chapman. HUNTINGFORD, GEORGE W. B. 1955 The Galla of Ethiopia. Ethnographic Survey of Africa: North-eastern
TROELTSCH, ERNST Africa, Part 2. London: International African Institute. KROEBER, A. L.; and KLUCKHOHN, CLYDE 1952 Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. Harvard University, Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Papers, Vol. 47, No. 1. Cambridge, Mass.: The Museum. LEACH, EDMUND R. 1954 Political Systems of Highland Burma: A Study of Kachin Social Structure. A publication of the London School of Economics and Political Science. London School of Economics and Political Science; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. LEVI-STRAUSS, CLAUDE 1949 Les structures elementaires de la parente. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. LEWIS, I. M. 1961 A Pastoral Democracy: A Study in Pastoralism and Politics Among the Northern Somali of the Horn of Africa. Published for the International African Institute. Oxford Univ. Press. LOWIE, ROBERT H. (1920) 1947 Primitive Society. Rev. ed. New York: Liveright. MAINE, HENRY J. S. (1861) 1960 Ancient Law: Its Connection With the Early History of Society, and Its Relations to Modern Ideas. Rev. ed. New York: Button; London and Toronto: Dent. -» A paperback edition was published in 1963 by Beacon. MALINOWSKI, BRONISLAW (1922) 1960 Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enter-prise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. London School of Economics and Political Science, Studies, No. 65. London: Routledge; New York: Button. MAQUET, JACQUES J. 1961 The Premise of Inequality in Ruanda: A Study of Political Relations in a Central African Kingdom. Published for the International African Institute. Oxford Univ. Press. MITCHELL, JAMES C. 1956 The Kalela Dance: Aspects of Social Relationships Among Urban Africans in Northern Rhodesia. Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, Papers, No. 27. Manchester (England) Univ. Press. MITCHELL, JAMES C. 1960 Tribalism and the Plural Society. Inaugural lecture at University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, 1959. Oxford Univ. Press. MORGAN, LEWIS H. (1851)1962 League of the Iroquois. Gloucester, Mass.: Smith. -» First published as League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois, in 2 vols. MORGAN, LEWIS H. (1877) 1964 Ancient Society. Edited by Leslie A. White. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap. MURDOCK, GEORGE P. 1949 Social Structure. New York: Macmillan. NADEL, S. F. 1942 A Black Byzantium: The Kingdom of Nupe in Nigeria. Oxford Univ. Press. NADEL, S. F. 1957 The Theory of Social Structure. London: Cohen & West; Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. REDFIELD, ROBERT 1956 Peasant Society and Culture: An Anthropological Approach to Civilization. Univ. of Chicago Press; Cambridge Univ. Press. -> A paperback edition, bound together with The Little Community, was published in 1961 by Cambridge University Press. RICHARDS, AUDREY I. (editor) 1960 East African Chiefs: A Study of Political Development in Some Uganda and Tanganyika Tribes. London: Faber; New York: Praeger. SCHAPERA, ISAAC (1938) 1955 A Handbook of Tswana Law and Custom. 2d ed. Oxford Univ. Press. SCHAPERA, ISAAC 1956 Government and Politics in Tribal Societies. London: Watts.
757
SCHMIDT, WILHELM; and KOPPERS, WILHELM 1924 Volker und Kulturen. Regensburg (Germany): Habbel. SIDGWICK, HENRY (1891) 1908 The Elements of Politics. 4th ed. London: Macmillan. SOUTHALL, AIDAN (editor) 1961 SociaJ Change in Modern Africa. Oxford Univ. Press. SRINIVAS, M. N. 1952 Religion and Society Among the Coorgs of South India. Oxford Univ. Press. STEWARD, JULIAN H. 1955 Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press. WILSON, GODFREY;-and WILSON, MONICA H. (1945) 1965 The Analysis of Social Change, Based on Observations in Central Africa. Cambridge Univ. Press.
TROELTSCH, ERNST Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923), German historian and sociologist, was born in Augsburg, a descendant of an old burgher family and the eldest son of a practicing physician. His father introduced him to the natural sciences, and he retained a keen sense for scientific thinking throughout his life. His interests, however, lay in the direction of religion and philosophy. From 1883 to 1888 he studied theology at the universities of Erlangen, Gottingen, and Berlin and for a short time was a Lutheran curate at Munich. He became a lecturer at Gottingen in 1891 and an associate professor of theology at Bonn in 1892. In 1894, at the age of 29, he became a professor at Heidelberg, where he remained for 21 years. In 1915, feeling that theology was narrow and confining, he transferred to philosophy at Berlin, where he lectured on a variety of topics, from the philosophy of religion to the philosophy of history. He was influenced by Kant and Hegel, and by Fichte and Schleiermacher, as well as by his teachers, especially Ritschl. In 1901 he married the daughter of a Mecklenburg officer; a son, Ernst Eberhard, was born in 1913. Troeltsch took part in politics, was long a member of the Baden upper house, and from 1919 to 1921 was a member of the Prussian Landtag and undersecretary of state for public worship. He died in 1923 in his fifty-eighth year. Troeltsch was conservative in politics. In the early days of World War i he was moved, as were many of his friends, including Max Weber, by what Weber called the "great and wonderful" fervor of the German people. Like almost all his fellow intellectuals, he saw rooted in the German nation idealist values that constituted the ethical justification for the war effort. Like Weber, he believed that his fatherland upheld an important spiritual heritage, as opposed to the materialistic values of the British and the French. Soon, however, under the in-
1 52
TROELTSCH, ERNST
fluence of Weber and Friedrich Meinecke, he separated himself from the conservative majority, opposed annexationist war aims, and advocated domestic democratization, which he considered urgent. He joined the circle around Prince Max of Baden and after the war became active in the founding of the German Democratic party. He supported the Weimar Republic and in the early 1920s defended the new constitution in monthly articles in the review Der Kunstwart, using the pseudonym "Spektator." These contributions rank among the most clearheaded political analyses of the day: he decried the "frightful demagoguery" of the right and urged that the republic be accepted wholeheartedly, despite its alien character (its basis in Anglo-French eighteenth-century values) and the inferior quality of its office holders. The true conservatism required to restore balance to German life could be brought about, he declared, only by the acceptance of the Weimar Republic. Troeltsch's articles appeared until four months before his death, representing his last efforts to save both humanity and rationality. Sociology of religion In his great sociological work, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches (1912), Troeltsch examined the history of Christianity up to the eighteenth century. He sought the answer to two fundamental questions: (1) Are religious beliefs and movements primarily the products of nonreligious factors or are they primarily irreducible phenomena that develop independently? and (2) the reciprocal question, To what extent do religious ideas and institutions affect other elements of society and culture? He raised these questions not simply in the abstract but with respect to Christianity in its total historical setting. Weber concerned himself with similar questions but evolved a rather different technique of study. Weber used ideal type constructions and, in a kind of post hoc mental experiment, attempted to hold some factors constant while he compared two or more cases. Troeltsch studied only Christianity and attempted to trace the whole vast interconnected web of factors impinging on it, delineating the place of religion within this total complex. The result—The Social Teaching—makes difficult reading but exhibits tremendous learning, and despite a certain diffuseness, it presents a host of valuable theoretical insights. It reveals the interaction of ideal and material factors at the same time that it conveys the unique quality of concrete historical situations. The Social Teaching affirms the reality and au-
tonomy of the religious factor—or, to use a more modern expression, finds that religion can be an independent variable in social change—but locates this autonomy in a context of interacting factors. Primitive Christianity was a religious movement, not reducible to displaced social protest, as Kautsky and the Marxists had tried to show, and its inner meaning contained autonomous implications for future development. But the forms of its beliefs, values, and organizations were to a great extent conditioned by circumstances, and once established, Christianity in turn affected other aspects of society and culture. Troeltsch examined this complex interaction of factors in relation to four aspects of society: family, economics, politics, and learning. In all four areas he saw Christianity exhibiting two contradictory but complementary tendencies—accommodation and protest, or compromise and absolutist rejection of compromise. Both were genuine expressions of New Testament values. He concluded his monumental study with the following summary: "The Ethos of the Gospel . . . is an ideal which requires a new world if it is to be fully realized . . . [it is] an ideal which cannot be realized within this world apart from compromise. Therefore the history of the Christian Ethos becomes the story of a constantly renewed search for this compromise, and of fresh opposition to this spirit of compromise" ([1912] 1931, pp. 999-1000). This great permeating rhythm of accommodation and protest has its sociological expression in three types of religious participation. The church compromises with the "world"—with society and culture; the sect rejects the world and compromise with it, as well as the social consequences of compromise; and individual religious spontaneity finds expression neither in creative compromise nor in dissent, but in mysticism. The appearance of these forms is conditioned by social and cultural influences, but each represents a genuine religious expression that is irreducible to other factors or variables. Troeltsch was influenced by Weber and, like him, was concerned with the relation of religion to economic activity. In an earlier work, Protestantism and Progress (1906a), he sought to find out how much the development of modern secular capitalism owes to Protestantism. Troeltsch saw Protestantism as originally a reaction, a return to medieval thinking, "which [swept] away such beginnings of a free and secular civilization as had already been toilsomely established." Its impact upon the rise of modernity was mainly "indirect and unconsciously produced," as well as "against its will"
TROELTSCH, ERNST ([1906a] 1958, pp. 85-87). Like Weber, he asked whether or not the this-worldly asceticism of Protestantism had provided indirect and unintentional support for the development of capitalist economic activity, and he agreed with Weber that Calvinism did have an important early influence. But he felt that Weber should have given greater emphasis to the fact that Reformed asceticism was itself "partly determined by ... the commercial situation in the Western countries," especially "the exclusion of Dissent from political life" (ibid., p. 138) and that it was economic decline in Germany that gave emphasis to the element of asceticism in traditional Luther anism. Curiously, although Troeltsch was a friend of Weber's and somewhat dependent upon him intellectually, he seemed unaware that he had seriously criticized Weber's thesis. Moreover, although he charged Weber with having failed to stress sufficiently the differences between Calvin and Calvinism, he did not seem to realize that this also was a highly critical appraisal. In the same work Troeltsch both denied any immediate or direct causal relationship between Protestantism and capitalism and declared that "Weber has, in my opinion, completely proved his case" (ibid., p. 138). Troeltsch believed that religion was more significantly affected by the development of modernity than the reverse. Yet he saw that despite "all the hostility to the churches and to Christianity" in his own time, culture and values derived from and rested upon Christian foundations. He felt that "individual autonomy," "belief in progress," "confidence in life," and even the "impulse to work" would be impossible, were it not for the Christian heritage (ibid., pp. 38-39). Toward the end of his life Troeltsch assessed the future of Christianity as "unpredictable," but he felt that it was "at a critical moment of its further development, and that very bold and far-reaching changes [were] necessary, transcending anything that [had] yet been achieved by any denomination" ([1923] 1957, p. 60). Historicism Troeltsch took a classic position with respect to the problem of historicism. Influenced by Dilthey, he believed in a sharp distinction between the methods appropriate to the natural sciences and those appropriate to study of the life of the human spirit. The former could use generalized categories and seek timeless regularities; the latter must endeavor to understand the meaning and uniqueness of spatially and temporally situated cultural complexes. History is "an immeasurable, incomparable profusion of always-new, unique, and hence indi-
153
vidual tendencies, welling up from undiscovered depths." History reveals individual configurations of ideas, values, strivings, relations, and situations in "always-new and always-peculiar individualizations" (ibid., p. 44). These "historical individuals" can be understood only in their own terms. Weber too had faced this issue, and his solution represents an important contribution to social science. He accepted the uniqueness of specific historical configurations and the importance of understanding meaning and quality, but he also developed generalized analytical categories for analysis. These he saw as formal in Kant's sense. He was thus able to break down the historical complexes into a number of analytical factors, to make comparative studies in which some factors were held constant as far as possible, and thereby to produce analytical and generalizing sociology. He did not, however, pursue the philosophical difficulties involved in this "nominalist" use of "universals" for scientific convenience. For Troeltsch the issue was more profound; he was concerned with its human and not its technical implications. He sought not simply a methodological posture for scientific work but "a vital and effective religious position, which alone could furnish my life with a center of reference for all practical questions and could alone give meaning and purpose to reflection upon the things of this world" (ibid., p. 37). Troeltsch's problem was this: If everything in history is individual and unique and is limited to specific times and places, is there then nothing suprahistorical in the products of man's search for truth and his creations of value? Can man make no contact with any extrahistorical truth or any transhistorical truths or values? In his Trennung von Staat und Kirche (1906£>) he introduced the concept of "polymorphous truth": Truth is one, but it is apprehended by men in historical forms that vary indefinitely. He rejected "monomorphous truth" as no longer genuinely accepted, save by Roman Catholics. In 1909, in his Absolutheit des Christentums, he sought the basis for transhistorical validity in the inner experience of the Christian and its effects on his actions and in an evolution toward universal religion. Troeltsch also looked for an extrahistorical element in what he called the "morality of conscience." Conscience arises from the need to preserve the inner integrity of personality amid "the flux and confusion of the life of the instincts." But this need has "a purely formal aim of independence from mere fate" and finds its content in historically relative cultural values. Personality and conscience do not represent a genuinely transhistorical basis for
154
TROELTSCH, ERNST
values, however, for the value of personality is itself culturally relative; our own high evaluation of it is derived from Christianity and unknown in our sense in the Far East ([1923] 1957, pp. 77-78, 121). Troeltsch later gave up these tenuous bases for extrahistorical validity but continued to be greatly concerned with what he saw as the fundamental conflict between "the critical scepticism generated by the ceaseless flux and manifold contradictions within the sphere of history and the demand of the religious consciousness for certainty, for unity, and for peace" (ibid., p. 39). He came to see all the world religions as unique and relative to given historical conditions, having validity only within a community of tradition. "The actual history of religion knows nothing of the common character of all religions, or of their natural trend toward Christianity" (ibid., p. 43). He did not limit this concern to the sphere of religion but in his Historismus und seine Probleme (1922), as he wrote later, he examined the "relation of individual historical facts to standards of value within the entire domain of history in connection with the development of political, social, ethical, aesthetic, and scientific ideas" and found that "even the validity of science and logic seemed to exhibit, under different skies and upon different soil, strong individual differences present .even in their deepest and innermost rudiments" ([1923] 1957, pp. 52-53). He held that mankind has little in common besides material needs and a capacity for mutual understanding. Cultures represented for Troeltsch unique historical products, and values, although the "source of all nobility and all greatness," are the consequence of a "molding which is peculiar, unique, and sui generis." Cultural values remain in a "permanent dependence on the natural basis and the temporary and special historic position of that basis. . . . Here there is nothing independent of time and universally valid except the stimulus and obligation to create a system of culture" (ibid., pp. 105-108). Troeltsch never found a basis within history itself for any transhistorical position for either knowledge or values. He concluded that validity is historically relative and conscience valid only for each individual. He fell back on faith, the anguished and dissatisfied faith he had never completely lost. He believed that the truth man sees from his limited and relative point of view is a refraction of a truth beyond and that relative values reflect a transcendent value realm. Thus he could say: "Scepticism and relativism are only an apparent necessary consequence of modern intellectual conditions and of Historicism. They may be overcome by way
of Ethics . . ." (ibid., p. 126). Ethical values are objective to the actor and challenge him to transcend his situation. Thus, they are genuine and valid, but finally rest upon a "deep subjectivity" and "personal resolve" (ibid., p. 126). It is perhaps an ironic example of the historical determinism with which he grappled that he himself found his last uneasy and unsatisfactory solution in his own version of the doctrine in which he had been brought up—-the Lutheran doctrine of salvation through faith alone. Troeltsch had created a stir among German intellectuals in 1896 when he appalled a group of theologians by announcing that "all is tottering," and when they rebuked him, walking out and slamming the door. He never ceased to concern himself with this tottering. His friend Meinecke said of him with irony and compassion that he was the incarnation of the idea expressed by both Heraclitus and Archimedes: Everything is in flux; give me a place to stand. This deeply religious man, in Baron von Hiigel's words, this "so realistic believer in God," struggled to find within the ebb and flow of history a stable basis for universally significant values. When his anguished search failed, he found a final position in an anguished faith. Shortly before his death Troeltsch wrote: "If there is any solution at all of these riddles and problems, with their conflicts and contradictions, that solution certainly is not to be found within their own sphere, but beyond it, in that unknown land, of which there are so many indications in the historic struggle of the spirit upwards, but which itself is never revealed to our eyes" ([1923] 1957, p. 146). THOMAS F. O'DEA [See
also CHRISTIANITY; HISTORY, article on THE
PHILOSOPHY
OF HISTORY; RELIGION;
SECTS
AND
CULTS; and the biographies of DILTHEY; MEINECKE; WEBER, MAX.] WORKS BY TROELTSCH (1906a) 1958 Protestantism and Progress: A Historical Study of the Relation of Protestantism to the Modern World. Boston: Beacon. -> First published as Die Bedeutung des Protestantismus fiir die Entstehung der modernen Welt. The first English translation was published in 1912 by Williams and Norgate and by Putnam. 1906Z? Die Trennung von Staat und Kirche: Der staatliche Religionsunterricht und die theologischen Fakultaten. Akademische Rede zur Feier des Geburtsfestes des hochstseligen Grossherzogs Karl Friedrich am 22. november 1906 bei dem Vortrag des Jahresberichts und der Verkiindung der akademischen Preise gehalten von dr. theol. et phil. h.c. Ernst Troeltsch. Heidelberg: Universitats-Buchdruckerei. (1906c) 1909 Wesen der Religion und der Religionswissenschaft. Pages 1-36 in Systematische christliche
TROTSKY, LEON Religion, by Ernst Troeltsch et al. 2d ed. Die Kultur der Gegenwart, t. 1, abt. 4, 2. Berlin: Teubner. (1909) 1912 Die Absolutheit des Christentums und die Religionsgeschichte. Vortrag gehalten auf der Versammlung der Freunde der Christlichen Welt zu Miihlacker am 3. oktober 1901. 2d rev. ed. Tubingen: Mohr. (1912) 1931 The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches. 2 vols. New York: Macmillan. -» First published as Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen. A paperback edition was published in 1960 by Harper. 1915a Augustin, die christliche Antike, und das Mittelalter: Im Anschluss an die Schrift, De civitate Dei. Munich and Berlin: Oldenbourg. 1915fe Das Wesen des Deutschen. Rede gehalten am 6. dezember 1914 in der vaterlandischen Versammlung in der Karlsruher Stadthalle. Heidelberg: Winter. 1916 Uber Massstabe zur Beurteilung historischer Diiige. Academic dissertation, University of Berlin. 1919 Die Dynamik der Geschichte nach der Geschichtsphilosophie des Positivismus. Berlin: Reuter. 1922 Der Historismus und seine Probleme. Gesamrnelte Schriften, Vol. 3. Tubingen: Mohr. (1923) 1957 Christian Thought: Its History and Application. New York: Meridian. -> Lectures written for delivery in England during March 1923 and first published by the University of London Press. A German edition was published in 1924 as Der Historismus und seine Uberwindung. 1924 Spektator-briefe: Aufsdtze iiber die deutsche Revolution und die Weltpolitik, 1918/22. Tubingen: Mohr. -> Published posthumously in book form. Deutscher Geist und Westeuropa: Gesamrnelte kulturphilosophische Aufsdtze und Reden. Tubingen: Mohr, 1925. Gesamrnelte Schriften von Ernst Troeltsch. 4 vols. Tubingen: Mohr, 1912-1925. -> Volume 1: Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen, 1912. Volume 2: Zur religiosen Lage, Religions-philosophic und Ethik, 1922. Volume 3: Der Historismus und seine Probleme, 1922. Volume 4: Aufsdtze zur Geistesgeschichte und Religions-soziologie, 1925. Volume 4 includes a comprehensive bibliography of Troeltsch's writings. Glaubenslehre. Nach Heidelberger Vorlesungen aus den Jahren 1911 und 1912. Munich & Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1925. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
HUGEL, FRIEDRICH VON 1923 Introduction. In Ernst Troeltsch, Christian Thought: Its History and Application. Univ. of London Press. HUGHES, H. STUART 1958 Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 18901930. New York: Knopf. YINGER, J. MILTON 1948 The Sociology of Religion of Ernst Troeltsch. Pages 309-315 in Harry E. Barnes (editor), Introduction to the History of Sociology. Univ. of Chicago Press.
TROTSKY, LEON Leon Trotsky (Lev Davidovich Bronstein) was born in the Ukraine in 1879 and assassinated in Mexico in 1940. Trotsky was not only a leader of the October revolution of 1917, commissar of
155
foreign affairs in the first Soviet government, founder of the Red Army and commissar of war from 1918 to 1925, cofounder of the Communist International, member of the Politburo of the Soviet Communist party from 1918 to 1927, and Stalin's chief antagonist and critic; he was also an outstanding thinker and original theorist of Marxism, whose ideas strongly influenced socialism and communism in the first four decades of this century. Permanent revolution The theory of permanent revolution is Trotsky's principal contribution to Marxism and the leitmotiv of his political activities. He first formulated that theory in a treatise called Results and Prospects, written and published in 1906, while he was in prison awaiting trial by a tsarist court for his leading role in the 1905 St. Petersburg Soviet. The origins of the theory can be traced back to the writings of Karl Marx, and it was also influenced by A. L. Helphand-Parvus, a Russo-German Marxist of note. But its actual formulation and application to the revolution of the twentieth century, and to Russian circumstances, was Trotsky's own work. Trotsky viewed the transition of society from capitalism to socialism, postulated by Marxism, as an immense succession of socioeconomic and political upheavals leading to the establishment of an international classless and stateless society. No single phase of this revolution, whatever its social character or geographic limitation, can be regarded as self-contained or self-sufficient. The process of society's transformation is in the nature of a chain reaction that cannot be arbitrarily interrupted or arrested. The revolution develops intensively, by "deepening" and affecting the whole structure of society, and extensively, by assuming international scope. From these general premises Trotsky developed a specific, prognostic analysis of the character of the Russian revolution. He rejected the view, which had been generally accepted by Marxists, that the Russian revolution would have to be bourgeois in character, as the French revolution of 1789-1793 had been. In this traditional Marxist view, the "task" of the revolution was to overthrow tsardom, sweep away obsolete semifeudal relationships and institutions, and establish a parliamentary democratic republic, under which Russia's productive forces would be free to develop on a capitalist basis and its working class free to wage its class struggles until such time as Russian society became sufficiently "mature" for socialism. Up to World War I even Lenin and the Bolsheviks adhered to this view, although Lenin occasionally deviated from it. The differences between Bolsheviks and Men-
156
TROTSKY, LEON
sheviks centered at that time on the question of which social class, the bourgeoisie or the workers, should exercise leadership in the revolution. The Mensheviks maintained that since the revolution was bourgeois, the bourgeoisie should lead it, while the workers should lend the bourgeoisie their critical support. Lenin argued that the Russian bourgeoisie was frightened of revolution and willing to compromise with tsardoni; consequently, only the working class, with the support of the peasantry, could accomplish this bourgeois revolution—despite and against the bourgeoisie. Trotsky agreed with Lenin's view that the industrial workers were the chief motive power of the upheaval, but he pointed out that precisely because of this the revolution could not remain bourgeois. He asserted that it would be driven by its own momentum beyond the limits set to it a priori by the traditionalist theory and that it would present a peculiar combination of two revolutions, a bourgeois one and a socialist one. Once the proletariat had assumed the leading role, it would be compelled by the logic of its own class interest to turn against the capitalists as well as against tsardom and the landlords; and it would proceed to establish its own dictatorship and to socialize the means of production. Russia, Trotsky predicted, would be the first country to set up a proletarian dictatorship. This was a startling and hotly contested conclusion: all Marxists, including the Leninists, still held that such a dictatorship could first be established only in one of the advanced industrial countries of the West. Trotsky went on to point out that because of its industrial and cultural backwardness and poverty, Russia could only begin the socialist revolution (or the building of socialism) but could not achieve or complete it except in association and cooperation with the industrial countries of the West. Indeed, the Russian revolution would not be a purely national phenomenon; it would be the prelude to European or global revolution. Just as the revolution would not be contained within its bourgeois stage, so it could not be brought to a halt within any national boundaries. Internationally as well as nationally the revolution would be "permanent." As author of this theory, Trotsky linked up with the classical Marxist tradition, but he also departed from it. He was the first Marxist to proclaim that the initiative for the anticapitalist revolution of this century would come from the underdeveloped part of the world rather than from the West. But he remained within the classical Marxist tradition insofar as he continued to see in the industrialized countries of the West the terra firma of socialism, its decisive domain, its chief potential center. A
backward country like Russia could and would have the lead in revolutionary initiative, but the lead in the actual establishment of socialism would still belong to the West. Shortly before 1917 Lenin arrived independently at the same conclusion, and this induced Trotsky to join the Bolshevik party. The idea of permanent revolution was embodied in the programmatic statements of the Communist International during the time that Lenin and Trotsky were its leading lights. It should be added that Trotsky did not favor coups or putsches staged by revolutionary minorities unsupported by the mass of the workers and that he was categorically opposed to "carrying revolution abroad on the point of bayonets." Permanent revolution, as he saw it, was an organic historic process, inherent in the logic of the class struggles and political conflicts of the age. The most dramatic implication of Trotsky's theory emerged in the 1920s, at the time of his conflict with Stalin. The great ideological controversy in the Bolshevik party after Lenin centered on the doctrinal opposition between two theories: Trotsky's permanent revolution and Stalin's socialism in a single country. Stalin asserted the self-sufficiency of the Russian revolution; and, at least up to World War n, his doctrine was manifest in a policy of Soviet isolationism and self-containment. As such it was necessarily antagonistic to the idea of permanent revolution. Trotsky proceeded to demonstrate theoretically the impossibility of an autarchic socialism, of a socialism confined to any single country, especially to a backward country in which the small-holding peasantry formed the majority of the population. He characterized the Soviet regime as a transitional social order, combining socialist and capitalist (and even precapitalist) elements; but he refused to recognize it as genuinely socialist. He viewed the isolation of Bolshevism within Russia's boundaries as a mere interval between two acts, as it were, of permanent revolution, an interval unduly prolonged by Stalinist errors and opportunism, but not a definite interruption of the revolutionary process. (Trotsky probably would have regarded the revolutionary aftermath of World War n, culminating in the Chinese revolution, as a continuation of the process begun in Russia in 1917, the long overdue new phase of permanent revolution.) Critique of Soviet bureaucracy Among Trotsky's many contributions to Marxist thinking, the one next in importance to his theory of permanent revolution is his critique of the Soviet bureaucracy. He was, with Lenin, an uncompro-
TROTSKY, LEON mising advocate of proletarian dictatorship, and, again like Lenin, he held that this dictatorship ought to be based on "proletarian, or Soviet, democracy." Its purpose was to consolidate the conquests of the revolution, to suppress the resistance of the former possessing classes, and to guarantee the social and political supremacy of the working class. This aim could not be achieved unless the workers, the poor peasants, and the social groups close to them enjoyed full freedom of expression and association. During the civil war such freedom was severely curtailed; and in the early 1920s the singleparty system was established. Trotsky at first treated this as a kind of emergency measure and refrained from elevating the practice of the single-party system to a principle. Presently, he came into conflict with the practice. As early as 1923 he had diagnosed the onset of a postrevolutionary reaction and the incipient "degeneration" of the Bolshevik party; and he had protested against the growing preponderance and arbitrary behavior of the party's bureaucracy. Between 1926 and 1928, characteristically invoking various precedents from the French Revolution, he warned of the dangers of a Russian Thermidor, Bonapartism, and Restoration. (Later still, in the 1930s, he maintained that Thermidor and Bonapartism were no longer dangers threatening the revolution but accomplished facts.) Trotsky saw the bureaucracy and the managerial groups of the Soviet Union as the new privileged strata who had usurped the fruits of the revolution and deprived the working class of its rights; he attacked Stalinism as the ideology of the new privileged strata. Up to 1934-1935 he advocated a reform of the Soviet Union, aiming at the revival of Soviet democracy; but in his last years he called for the overthrow of the bureaucratic dictatorship and of Stalin's personal rule by means of revolution. However, he insisted that the Soviet bureaucracy was not a new and independent social class, exploiting other classes, but a "cancerous growth on the body of the working class"; that the Soviet Union was, even under Stalin, a "workers' state," although a "degenerate" one; and that Marxists were obliged to defend the Soviet state "unconditionally" against its capitalist—imperialist enemies. He advocated a revolution against Stalinism that, as he explained, was to be political, not social: its aim was to do away with Stalin's oppressive government, to reduce the new inequality, to abolish the single-party system and the "leader cult," and to bring the state under workers' control. But the revolution was not to change anything in the basic system of social ownership of the means of production; on the contrary, it was to preserve that
157
system and revitalize it. These views aroused vehement controversy among Trotsky's adherents, some of whom (like James Burnham and others) considered the Soviet bureaucracy to be a new exploiting class and Soviet society a "managerial society," not different in kind from the German society under Hitler or the Italian under Mussolini. (In consequence they renounced all political solidarity with the U.S.S.R. and broke with Trotsky.) Other contributions While the ideas just summarized are at the core of so-called Trotskyism, the importance of Trotsky's contribution to the strategy and tactics of the Communist International should also be stressed. Trotsky was in 1921-1922 one of the chief initiators of the policy of the "united front"; and in his later critique of the Stalinized Comintern his analysis of the rise of Nazism was most remarkable. He was the first, if not the only, Marxist to grasp clearly the totalitarian character, the destructive explosiveness, and the imperialist fury of Nazism. While Stalin and his followers underrated Nazism, treating it as a more or less conventional form of reaction ("one of the agencies of finance-capitalism"), Trotsky, as early as 1929-1930, diagnosed it as a new plebeian form of counterrevolution, drawing its dynamic force from the despair of the petty-bourgeois and lumpenproletarian masses faced with the unemployment and misery of the great slump of 19291932. He advocated, in vain, joint socialist-communist action to prevent the seizure of power by Hitler and the new world war Hitler's victory could bring. In 1935-1936 he criticized as opportunistic and defeatist the Stalinist "popular front" policies, especially as applied in France and Spain. In subsequent years he exposed the great purges and the Moscow trials by which Stalin exterminated all his communist critics and opponents; and he founded the Fourth International. Trotsky was a many-sided personality, a man of action as well as a theorist, a prolific author and an orator of genius. He was unrivaled as a Marxist writer on military theory. While Clausewitz treated war as a "continuation of politics by different means," Trotsky showed it to be a continuation also of economics, class struggle, and social psychology. He was a historian of the highest order; his History of the Russian Revolution (1931-1933) is a huge artistic canvas depicting the events of 1917 as well as a theoretical interpretation. His biographical gifts are evident in My Life (1930a), in his various writings on Lenin, and to a lesser extent in his Stalin (1941). He was outstanding also as a literary critic. His use of Marxism as a tool of artistic
1 58
TROTTER, WILFRED
criticism was free from dogma; and he was uncompromisingly opposed to the manufacturing of any "proletarian culture" or "proletarian literature" and to any form of party tutelage over the sciences and the arts. He defended Freudian psychoanalysis against Bolshevik and Pavlovian critics; and in one of his popularizations of dialectical materialism he confidently predicted, in the year 1926, the advent of the atomic age and forecast that the new technological revolution would coincide with and accelerate the social revolution of this century. He was defeated in his lifetime, slandered, and assassinated. His works and memory were still banned from his native country even in the 1960s, well after the collapse of the Stalin cult. But his ideas—his views on capitalist society, his critique of postrevolutionary bureaucratic privilege and of nationalist (Stalinist and Social Democratic) distortions of socialism—remain relevant to the issues agitating the communist camp and the world at large in the second half of this century. ISAAC DEUTSCHER [For the historical context of Trotsky's work, see COMMUNISM; MARXISM; SOCIALISM; and the biographies of LENIN and MARX.] WORKS BY TROTSKY .Nashi politicheskiia zadachi: Takticheskie i organizatsionnye voprosy (Our Political Tasks: Tactical and Organizational Questions). Geneva: Rossiiskaia Sotsialdemokraticheskaia Rabochaia Partiia, Tipografiia Partii. (1906) 1965 Results and Prospects. New York: Pioneer. -> First published in Russian. The 1965 edition is bound together with Trotsky 1930&. 1918 Our Revolution; Essays on Working-class and International Revolution: 1904-1917. New York: Holt. -> A collection of essays first published separately in Russian. (1920) 1935 Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky. New ed. London: Allen & Unwin. -> First published in Russian. A paperback edition was published in 1961 by the University of Michigan Press. 1922 Between Red and White. London: Communist Party of Great Britain. 1923—1925 Kak vooruzhalas revolutsiia (How the Revolution Armed Itself). 3 vols. Moscow: Vysshii Voennyi Redaktsionnyi Sovet. -» A collection of Trotsky's military writings, orders of the day, and speeches. (1924) 1959 Lenin. Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Books. -» A collection of character sketches about Lenin, first published in Russian. 1925-1927 Sochineniia (Works). Vols. 2-21. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel'stvo. -> A projected complete edition of Trotsky's works; its publication was discontinued in 1927, at the time of Trotsky's expulsion from the party. (1930a) 1960 My Life. New York: Grosset & Dunlap. -» 1904
First published in Berlin in two volumes as Moia zhizn'. (1930b) 1965 Permanent Revolution. New York: Pioneer. -> First published in Russian. The 1965 edition is bound together with Trotsky 1906. (1930c) 1957 The Third International After Lenin. New York: Pioneer. -» First published in French. (1931-1933) 1957 The History of the Russian Revolution. 3 vols. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press. -» First published in Russian. (1932) 1962 The Stalin School of Falsification. 2d ed. New York: Pioneer. -> First published in Russian. (1937) 1957 The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going? New York: Pioneer. -» First published in English. (1941) 1958 Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence. New York: Grosset & Dunlap. -» First published in English. The Age of Permanent Revolution: A Trotsky Anthology. Edited with an introduction by Isaac Deutscher. New York: Dell, 1964. Basic Writings. Edited and introduced by Irving Howe. London: Seeker & Warburg, 1964. -> A paperback edition was published by Random House in 1965. Diary in Exile, 1935. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958. The Trotsky Papers, 1917-1922. Edited and annotated by Jan M. Meijer. Vols. 1—. The Hague: Mouton, 1964—. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
DEUTSCHER, ISAAC 1954 The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879-1921. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. DEUTSCHER, ISAAC 1959 The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky, 1921-1929. London and New York: Oxford Univ. Press. DEUTSCHER, ISAAC 1963 The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky, 1929-1940. London and New York: Oxford Univ. Press. EASTMAN, MAX 1925 Leon Trotsky: The Portrait of a Youth. New York: Greenberg. HARVARD UNIVERSITY, LIBRARY 1959 Guide to the Papers of Leon Trotsky and Related Collections in the Harvard College Library. Unpublished manuscript. LEVINE, ISAAC D. 1959 The Mind of an Assassin. New York: Farrar. WOLFE, BERTRAM D. (1948) 1964 Three Who Made a Revolution: A Biographical History. 4th rev. ed. New York: Dial.
TROTTER, WILFRED Wilfred Batten Lewis Trotter (1872-1939) was born at Coleford in Gloucestershire, England, and entered University College, London, as a medical student in 1908. He became a distinguished surgeon and teacher of surgery. His most important research in the field of surgery was a repetition of Sir Henry Head's experiment on the restoration of cutaneous sensibility after section of a sensory nerve fiber. In this experiment he reached conclusions somewhat different from those of Head.
TRUSTEESHIP In 1931 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, and in 1935 he became professor of surgery in University College Hospital. Trotter's claim to fame, however, does not rest principally on his distinction as a surgeon. He became known to the world outside medicine in 1916, when he published a book entitled Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War. This book aroused much interest and exerted a widespread influence on both social scientists and the general public. Social science was not at this time a new interest to Trotter; in 1908 and 1909 he had already published two articles on this subject, which, in 1916, became the first two chapters of his book. The end of World War I led to the issue of a new edition that included an illuminating section on prejudice (see especially pages 173-180, "Postscript of 1919" in 1953 edition). In the year before his death, the imminence of World War n led him to write the press two letters which showed that his interest in social science and its application to practical social problems had not ceased. The essence of Trotter's thought was that there is a herd instinct leading animals to congregate and determining their behavior with respect to their own kind, that the nature of this herd instinct can be revealed by studying the gregarious animals, and that, since man also is a gregarious animal, his behavior can be predicted and controlled by means of the knowledge so gained. In the years immediately following its publication, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War was widely read, discussed, and quoted, but it has had little lasting influence. Its immediate success may have resulted not only from its real merits of bold thinking and forceful presentation, but also from its topicality and the hope it held out for a rational and scientific approach to the problems that led to wars. Since that time, however, the development of the social sciences has followed lines other than those envisaged by Trotter. Instead of speculating about the instinctive basis of social behavior, social scientists now make actual studies of the behavior of groups. Trotter's book, read now, seems oddly speculative and remote from any systematic social observation and unduly colored by the author's own prejudices. These factors have dated his book, yet Trotter has a real claim to be considered one of the pioneers of scientific social study. He was important as one of the first to realize the necessity of providing a scientific basis for the understanding of social facts. He may well have been mistaken in what he chose as the appropriate road to this goal;
159
he was surely right in emphasizing the importance of the goal. In that emphasis lies the contribution for which he deserves to be remembered. R. H. THOULESS [See also COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR.] WORKS BY TROTTER
1908
Herd Instinct and Its Bearing on the Psychology of Civilised Man. Sociological Review 1:227-248. 1909 Sociological Application of the Psychology of Herd Instinct. Sociological Review 2:36-54. (1916) 1953 Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War: 1916-1919. Edited by R. W. Chapman. New York: Macmillan. -> First published as Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War. 1942 Collected Papers. Oxford Univ. Press. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
ELLIOTT, T. R. 1941 Wilfred Batten Lewis Trotter: 1872-1939. Royal Society of London, Obituary Notices of Fellows 3:325-344. -> Contains a comprehensive bibliography.
TRUNCATION AND CENSORSHIP See under STATISTICAL ANALYSIS, SPECIAL PROBLEMS OF.
TRUSTEESHIP The concept of trusteeship as understood in contemporary international relations is best expressed in article 73 of the United Nations Charter. By the terms of this article, member states of the United Nations recognize the principle that the interests of the inhabitants of dependent territories "are paramount, and accept as a sacred trust the obligation to promote to the utmost" their "well-being." According to article 73, this obligation includes ensuring the "political, economic, social, and educational advancement" of the inhabitants of dependent territories and their "just treatment" and "protection against abuses." It also commits the administering states to develop "self-government" in the dependent territories and to take "due account of the political aspirations of the peoples." In order to ensure the fulfillment of these goals, contemporary trusteeship seeks? to provide varying measures of international supervision. History. The concept of trusteeship involves a continuation and an expansion of the concept and system of mandates set forth in article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations and of the requirement in article 23(b) that League members "secure just treatment" for the native inhabitants in their dependent territories.
160
TRUSTEESHIP
The International Labour Organisation (ILO) provided another source for the contemporary concept of trusteeship. Starting in 1930, the ILO adopted a series of conventions designed to establish standards for the treatment of indigenous inhabitants in dependent territories, a movement which culminated with the recommendation in 1944, and the adoption three years later, of the comprehensive Convention on Social Policy in NonMetropolitan Territories. Taking a longer and less formal view, one finds that the concept has much deeper origins. Imperialist acts and policies were often, if not usually, accompanied by statements concerning obligations toward the indigenous inhabitants, although scholars have disagreed concerning the sincerity, meaning, and strength of these declarations and their precise relationship to modern trusteeship. Nevertheless, as early as 1885, with the signature at the Berlin conference of the general act concerning the Congo basin, some obligations toward the inhabitants of dependent territories were stated in legal form, and five years later, at the Brussels conference, international machinery was created to facilitate the implementation of these and other obligations. Scholars have interpreted the development of the concept of trusteeship in varying ways. Some have seen it as a notable departure from past colonial policies and as a significant step in the direction of world order, while others have seen it merely as a fagade for the continuation of traditional imperial practices. Still others have advanced a full range of views between these two extremes. In terms of the effects of trusteeship, the first interpretation appears to have been closest to the mark. Whatever the motives of those who wrote the concept of trusteeship into various legal documents, in operation it appears to have led to improvements in colonial regimes and to have hastened the process of decolonization. It is worthy of note that improved colonial practices appear to have resulted in intensified demands for the liquidation of colonialism. The League of Nations Covenant prescribed extensive obligations only for the administration of dependent territories detached from the vanquished states in World War i, i.e., the mandates. A rather modest goal was set for all other areas. The concept of trusteeship as included in the United Nations Charter applied to all dependent territories. However, although the obligations and goals of trusteeship were universally applicable, the charter envisaged widely different degrees of international supervision. It divided dependent territories into
two categories: trust territories and non-self-governing territories. For the former, chapters xn and xni of the charter created an elaborate system of supervision, consisting primarily of the Trusteeship Council, which is composed of an equal number of administering and nonadministering states, including the five permanent members of the Security Council. For the other category, non-self-governing territories, member states were merely required to transmit to the secretary-general of the United Nations statistical and other information relating to economic, social, and educational conditions in the territories (Chapter xi). It is significant, though, that the General Assembly's Fourth Committee, where matters relating to both systems are considered, was named simply the Trusteeship Committee. Which regimen applied to any given dependent territory depended upon the administering state, since the decision to place a territory within the trusteeship system was a voluntary one. In theory, all dependent territories were eligible for the trusteeship system, although article 77 of the charter singled out former mandates and territories belonging to the defeated states of World War n as being pre-eminently eligible. Actually, only dependent territories falling into these two categories have been placed within the trusteeship system. In 1947 the General Assembly failed to adopt a resolution proposed by India expressing the hope that administering states would propose trusteeship agreements for other dependent territories. Thus, under both the League of Nations and the United Nations, the most extensive commitments have applied only to dependent territories detached from states defeated in the two world wars. On the other hand, the supervisory and enforcement machinery of the International Labour Organisation has applied equally, regardless of the status of the territory before the League or the UN, if the administering state has ratified the relevant conventions. Eleven territories were eventually placed within the trusteeship system. One of these, the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, under United States administration, was designated as a strategic area under the special provisions outlined in articles 82 and 83, which had been inserted in the charter to accommodate American wishes. (The United States may restrict access to the territory, and it need not extend the economic privileges it exercises there to other states.) Ultimate supervisory authority with respect to this territory rests with the Security Council rather than the General Assembly, which has this authority in all other cases. This authority is relevant and exercised particularly at the time
TRUSTEESHIP of the approval and the termination of the trusteeship agreement. The Security Council, however, transferred routine supervisory functions with respect to the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands to the Trusteeship Council. The UN's supervision of all eleven territories has been quite similar. The trusteeship system thus included only a small fraction of the territories and peoples under colonial rule at the conclusion of World War n. However, the system appears to have had a broader impact than its limited application would indicate. Seven of the trust territories were grouped, for administrative purposes, with non-self-governing territories. Consequently, the UN has often considered issues affecting the latter as well. More importantly, developments in the trust territories inevitably have had an impact in other dependent areas. The system in action. Over the years an elaborate system has been developed, one which has allowed much more extensive contacts than were possible under the League of Nations' mandates system. The administering authorities are required to submit annual reports on the administration of the territories. These reports are based on a questionnaire prepared by the Trusteeship Council, with special questions prepared for certain individual territories. When the Trusteeship Council considers a report, a special representative of the administering authority, often the highest-ranking administrative official in the trust territory, attends the sessions for the purpose of making statements and answering questions. In addition, written and oral petitions concerning the trust territories can be submitted to the United Nations, and the United Nations can dispatch special and periodic visiting missions to the trust territories. Through these several devices, the United Nations has maintained close contact with the inhabitants of the trust territories and with the individuals responsible for their administration. This close contact has greatly contributed to the trusteeship system's effectiveness. As applied to Somaliland, the trusteeship system had certain additional special features. This was a consequence of the General Assembly's role in bringing the territory into the system and of the fact that Italy, the defeated administrator of the territory, was allowed to resume administrative responsibilities. Italy agreed to be aided and advised in the administration of the territory by an advisory council composed of representatives of Colombia, Egypt, and the Philippines. The most important special feature was that the trusteeship agreement was limited to a ten-year period after
161
its approval by the General Assembly on December 2, 1950. At the expiration of this period Somaliland had to be given independence. In no other case would the administering authorities allow a final target date for independence to be established. At the time that the United Nations Charter was drafted, it was generally expected that all League of Nations mandates would be placed within the trusteeship system, other than Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Palestine, which had already gained, or were about to gain, independence. The exception was South-West Africa, a mandate of the Union of South Africa. The General Assembly sought, through a series of resolutions, to induce the Union of South Africa to place South-West Africa within the trusteeship system. After the futility of these efforts became apparent, and on the basis of an advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice issued in 1950, the General Assembly, starting in 1953, has established a series of committees in an attempt to exercise a measure of international supervision over the administration of the territory. Since the Union of South Africa's willingness to cooperate with these bodies has been severely circumscribed, their effectiveness has been extremely limited. General Assembly resolutions sharply critical of aspects of the administration of the territory, especially of the application of the Union's apartheid policy, have had little effect. Starting with the first session, there has been pressure in the General Assembly to create machinery so that non-self-governing territories would be subject to almost the same measure of international supervision as trust territories. This pressure would have existed in any case, given the anticolonial bias of the General Assembly, but it probably gained strength because of the limited application of the trusteeship system. Article 73(e), which required administering states to submit statistical and other information relating to economic, social, and educational conditions in their nonself-governing territories, has provided a basis for action by the General Assembly. The initial step was the creation of a committee, composed of an equal number of administering and nonadministering states, to examine and consider this information. The Committee on Information from Non-SerfGoverning Territories sought to imitate the Trusteeship Council. It prepared a standard form, which resembled the Council's questionnaire, for administering states to follow in submitting information. Its recommendations have paralleled those of the
162
TRUSTEESHIP
Trusteeship Council. Attempts were made to give the committee the right to receive petitions and dispatch visiting missions, but these efforts were unsuccessful. Some administering states did, however, respond to the urgings of the General Assembly and include in their delegations to the committee representatives of the indigenous inhabitants of their non-self-governing territories and specialists on various aspects of administration. Although article 73(e) does not require the submission of information on constitutional and political developments in the non-self-governing territories, the General Assembly always encourages the administering states to supply such material, and since 1962 all states do so. Beyond creating the Committee on Information, the General Assembly assumed the power of ruling on whether or not administering states should transmit or could cease transmitting information on specific territories. Portugal alone has defied the General Assembly and refused to submit information, insisting that its overseas territories are not colonies, but integral parts of the state. When dependent territories were given independence or were fully integrated on equal terms into independent states, the General Assembly raised no objection to the administering state's ceasing to transmit information. Cases which did not involve either of these solutions were controversial. The aims of the General Assembly with respect to both trust territories and non-self-governing territories have been similar. They have included improving colonial practices in various ways, eliminating all racial discrimination, and, above all, liquidating colonialism. In this sense the United Nations has differed from the League of Nations, for the concept of trusteeship as applied in the League focused principally on the first and to a much lesser extent on the second and third of these goals. The activities of other international organizations in this field have generally followed the League pattern, although in July 1944 the International Labour Organisation proclaimed that it had "embarked on a process of 'decolonization' " (1944b, p. 27). The Trusteeship Council and the Committee on Information have broadly shared the General Assembly's understanding of trusteeship. However, since the administering powers have been in a considerably stronger position in these two bodies, they have taken a somewhat more sanguine view of the adequacy of existing colonial practices and have made considerably more modest demands with respect to the pace of decolonization. In addition, these two bodies have been more seriously con-
cerned about the nature of the political system of the emerging states than the General Assembly, which has been content to advocate the principles of the plebiscite and universal suffrage. Thus the UN's handling of its trusteeship functions had been characterized by tension between the organs principally concerned. From the first session, those with anticolonial views have had numerical superiority in the General Assembly, and as the UN's membership has grown, so has the relative voting strength of this group. However, since the effectiveness of the UN's activities has depended on the voluntary compliance of the administering states, there have always been distinct limits as to how far this voting strength could be pressed. In specific terms, although the anticolonial group could vote actions which might alienate minor colonial powers, such as Belgium and Portugal, they could not afford to alienate the major administering states, in particular the United Kingdom. Starting in 1960, the tone and tempo of the United Nations proceedings with respect to its trusteeship functions has changed sharply. The increasingly rapid liquidation of colonialism in Africa, marked that year by the granting of independence to the French African territories and the former Belgian Congo, signified the acceptance by the administering states of a rate of decolonization which they hitherto had resisted. Upon entering the United Nations, as seventeen did that year, the emerging states swelled the anticolonial majority. As more and more trust territories attained the ultimate goals of the system, the importance of the Trusteeship Council faded. The first major sign of the change was the passage of General Assembly Resolution 1514 (xv), which requested administering states to take "immediate steps" to transfer "all powers" to the peoples of trust and non-self-governing territories. In 1961 a special committee was created to examine and to make recommendations and suggestions concerning the implementation of this resolution. States holding anticolonial views were given a predominant position on the committee, which was given powers almost equivalent to those of the Trusteeship Council. In 1964 this committee assumed the functions of the Committee on Information, which was disbanded. Since 1960, the General Assembly has taken the view that the period of trusteeship is nearly over, and that colonialism should be liquidated as rapidly as possible. Evaluation. Assessments of the application of the concept of trusteeship are technically difficult and also raise various value-laden issues. Depend-
TRUSTEESHIP ing on their view of colonialism and their image of what attributes emerging states should have, scholars and statesmen have interpreted the record in widely different terms. Both the legality and the efficacy of the way in which the concept of trusteeship has been applied to non-self-governing territories have been hotly debated. Although the debate has been more moderate, the record of the trusteeship system in trust territories has also been controversial. Some have argued that the United Nations has done too much, while others have maintained that it has done too little. Similarly, some have felt that the administering states have more than fulfilled their obligations with respect to both the indigenous inhabitants of dependent territories and the international community, while others have thought that they have been laggard. Of course the debate has had other dimensions as well. Belgium, for example, has complained that the provisions of Chapter xi of the United Nations Charter have been applied only to dependent territories which are geographically separated from the administering state and has stated that they should also have been applied to dependent territories within states. The Trusteeship Council has been criticized because of the "political" nature of its proceedings and contrasted unfavorably with the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League, where a more "technical" atmosphere prevailed. This characteristic has been attributed to the fact that the Trusteeship Council is composed of representatives of states, while the Permanent Mandates Commission was composed of individuals appointed in their own capacity. The United Nations has been disparaged because it merely "ventilates" existing colonial practices, rather than suggests constructive alternatives, and shows little concern for the political structure of emerging states. The lack of objective standards by which to measure achievements and the failure to construct such criteria or even to measure progress in dependent territories against that in independent territories has often been decried; but little academic work has been done in this area. Most scholarship has concentrated on the historical description of the activities of the League of Nations and the United Nations and on the legal and formal aspects of the concept of trusteeship. Prominent among the explanations for this is the fact that formal and legal analyses are technically easier. They can be based principally on documentary sources, and they avoid difficult problems of establishing and delimiting interrelationships.
763
The most that can be said, at present, concerning the effects of trusteeship is that it has altered the climate of opinion in the dependent territories, the administering states, and other countries. Although some steps have been made in the direction of determining more precisely through what means, in which directions, and with what effects the climate of opinion has been altered, this too remains an important task for future scholarship. HAROLD K. JACOBSON [See also INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATION; INTERNATIONAL POLITICS. Other relevant material may be found in COLONIALISM; IMPERIALISM; NATION.! BIBLIOGRAPHY
BEIKOPOULOS, NIKOLAOS 1960 Traite de territoires dependants. Athens: Privately published. -» Volume 1, Le systeme de tutelle d'apres la Charte de San Francisco, was published in 1960 as the first part of a projected three-volume work. CHIDZERO, BARNARD T. G. 1961 Tanganyika and International Trusteeship. Oxford Univ. Press. ->• Issued under the auspices of the Royal Institute of International Affairs. CHOWDHURI, RAMENDRA N. 1955 International Mandates and Trusteeship Systems: A Comparative Study. The Hague: Nijhoff. CLAUDE, INIS L. (1956) 1964 Trusteeship as an Approach to Peace. Pages 318-343 in Inis L. Claude, Swords Into Plowshares: The Problems and Progress of International Organization. 3d ed., rev. New York: Random House. COLEMAN, JAMES S. 1956 Togoland. International Conciliation 509:3-91. EMERSON, RUPERT 1965 Colonialism, Political Development, and the UN. International Organization 19: 484-503. FINKLESTEIN, LAWRENCE S. 1955 Somaliland Under Italian Administration: A Case Study in United Nations Trusteeship. New York: Woodrow Wilson Foundation. FLETCHER-COOKE, JOHN 1959 Some Reflections on the International Trusteeship System, With Particular Reference to Its Impact on the Governments and Peoples of the Trust Territories. International Organization 13:422-430. Fox, ANNETTE BAKER 1950 United Nations and Colonial Development. International Organization 4:199—218. Fox, ANNETTE BAKER 1951 International Organization for Colonial Development. World Politics 3:340-368. GARDINIER, DAVID E. 1963 Cameroon: United Nations Challenge to French Policy. Oxford Univ. Press. HAAS, ERNST B. 1952 The Reconciliation of Conflicting Colonial Policy Aims: Acceptance of the League of Nations Mandate System. International Organization 6:521-536. HAAS, ERNST B. 1953 The Attempt to Terminate Colonialism: Acceptance of the United Nations Trusteeship System. International Organization 7:1—21. INTERNATIONAL LABOUR OFFICE 1944a Minimum Standards of Social Policy in Dependent Territories. International Labour Conference, 26th Session, Philadelphia, 1944. Report No. 5. Montreal: International Labour Office.
1 64
TUGAN-BARANOVSKII, MIKHAIL I.
INTERNATIONAL LABOUR OFFICE 1944b The Twentysixth Session of the International Labour Conference: Philadelphia, April to May 1944. International Labour Review 50, no. 1:1-39. JACOBSON, HAROLD KARAN 1962 The United Nations and Colonialism: A Tentative Appraisal. International Organization 16:37-56. MURRAY, JAMES N. 1957 The United Nations Trusteeship System. Illinois Studies in the Social Sciences, Vol. 40. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press. RIVLIN, BENJAMIN 1955 Self-determination and Dependent Areas. International Conciliation 501:195271. HOWE, EDWARD T. 1964 The Emerging Anti-colonial Consensus in the United Nations. Journal of Conflict Resolution 8:209-230. SADY, EMIL J. 1957 The United Nations and Dependent Peoples. Pages 813-1017 in Robert E. Asher et al., The United Nations and Promotion of the General Welfare. Washington: Brookings Institution. TOUSSAINT, CHARMIAN EDWARDS 1956 The Trusteeship System of the United Nations. New York: Praeger. -> Published under the auspices of the London Institute of World Affairs. WRIGHT, QUINCY 1930 Mandates Under the League of Nations. Univ. of Chicago Press.
TUGAN-BARANOVSKII, MIKHAIL I. Mikhail I. Tugan-Baranovskii (1865-1919), Russian economist, writer on public policy, and economic historian, is internationally known for his contributions to business-cycle theory. Tugan-Baranovskii was born in Solyonoye near Kharkov in the Ukraine. In 1888 he was awarded a degree in the natural sciences and two years later received a degree in law and economics from Kharkov University. From 1895 on he was intermittently connected with St. Petersburg University, and in 1913 he was elected to the chair of political economy and statistics, but the government refused to endorse his election. He did take the chair in 1917, but after the Bolshevik revolution he moved to Kiev, where he became dean of the law faculty and a member of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. He also served as finance minister of the Ukrainian republic established in 1918. In 1889 Tugan-Baranovskii had married Lydia Karlovna Davydova, whose mother was the founder and owner of Mir Bozhii ("God's World"), a review with Marxist leanings. Through his wife's connections, Tugan-Baranovskii was launched into the world of St. Petersburg publicists and soon gained a pre-eminent position among them. Debate with Narodniki. Russian intellectual life since the 1860s had by and large been dominated by the Narodniki (populists). They believed that Russia could bypass capitalism altogether and could develop as a socialist country based on peasants,
who would be organized in communes, and cottage workers (kustars}, who would be organized in associations. However, vigorous economic activity in Russia during the 1890s and the impact of Marxist ideology caused the Narodniki to modify their views somewhat. From Marx they borrowed the idea that capitalism has an inherent tendency to undermine its own home market by creating a pauperized proletariat. The Narodniki argued that whereas advanced industrial nations counteracted this tendency by seeking foreign markets, backward Russia was hardly in a position to compete for such markets; that the Russian government was therefore bound to fail in its efforts to foster capitalism through tariffs and subsidies; and that Russian socialists must effect social change through the peasants and not through the factory workers. Tugan-Baranovskii, taking issue with the extreme and primitive underconsumption theories of the Narodniki and also drawing heavily on Marxist literature, evolved and sharpened his theories concerning the problems of a developing industrial economy in general and the problems of Russia's economic development in particular. His debate with the Narodniki was carried on at the meetings of the Free Economic Society in St. Petersburg and in the periodical literature. Tugan-Baranovskii's two most important books, which established his reputation as a scholar and with which he earned his master's and doctor's degrees (1894; 1898), both resulted from his desire to refute Narodnik theories about the future of Russia's economic development. Theory of crises. The first book, an examination of industrial crises in England, was a pioneer piece of historical investigation, based on research done in the British Museum and in Russian libraries. With Narodnik theories in mind, TuganBaranovskii showed that even in Britain, where the role of foreign trade was paramount, capitalism was the product of internal evolution and was based on the domestic market; he also showed that smallscale "independent" domestic industry inevitably collapsed under the impact of mechanized factory production, although small industry often continued to spring up at various stages of capitalistic development. In this book Tugan-Baranovskii also presented his main theoretical contribution, the disproportion ality theory of crises. According to this theory, crises arise when some sectors of industry are allowed to expand out of proportion to other sectors because of the irrational allocation of investment between the capital-goods industries and the consumer-goods industries. Tugan-Baranovskii believed
TUGAN-BARANOVSKII, MIKHAIL I. that the danger of such disproportion, and of a consequent crisis, arises only when capital has been newly accumulated, for then there is no sound basis in experience for estimating which sector will require new investment. Tugan extended his theory to account for entire business cycles as well as for crises by taking into account the workings of the credit system. He maintained that crises and depressions are periods during which idle loan capital accumulates and interest rates are low. Presently, new investment activity begins again, but the length of time required to complete many of the new projects is such that any latent disproportion in the allocation of the newly invested capital does not become evident until a considerable period of prosperity has been enjoyed. Only when the new projects are well under way does the disproportion come to the surface and lead again to the inevitable crisis. Critique of Marxism. Tugan-Baranovskifs interpretation of crises implied a fundamental criticism of Marxist theory and earned him the epithet "revisionist," although his critical approach to Marxism antedated the appearance of revisionism among Western Marxists. In one of his earliest articles, "Uchenie o predel'noi poleznosti khoziaistvennykh blag" (1890; "The Doctrine of Marginal Utility of Economic Goods"), Tugan-Baranovskii attempted to revise Marxist theory by arguing that marginal utility theory and the labor theory of value supplement each other. His unorthodox approach to Marxism can also be seen in his early biographical sketches of P. J. Proudhon and J. S. Mill (1891; 1892). Indeed, he was one of a group of intellectuals and publicists known as the Legal Marxists. While it is commonly thought that they were called Legal Marxists either because they refrained from illegal activities or because they published their works only in legal publications, neither view is, according to R. Kindersley, quite correct: instead, he believes they were called Legal Marxists because of their strict intellectual honesty (1962). Tugan-Baranovskii rejected the two explanations of crises that Marx had advanced. The first explanation, that crises are produced because the rate of profit falls as the proportion of capital increases, he dismissed as not in accordance with observed fact. In Theoretische Grundlagen des Marxismus (1905a), he argued that according to Marx's own labor theory of value, a rising organic composition of capital, far from leading to a falling rate of profit as Marx supposed, must lead to a rising rate of profit. The second Marxist explanation, that crises result from underconsumption by the masses, he disposed of by arguing that production creates its
1 65
own demand and that hindrances to the expansion of capitalism lie not in consumer demand but in production. Unlike Marx, Tugan-Baranovskii did not believe that the breakdown of capitalism is an economic necessity. Assessment of the disproportionality theory. Already during Tugan-Baranovskii's lifetime, Russian industrialization policy developed along lines he considered possible. Later, during the Stalin era, large-scale expansion of productive capacity was planned and achieved without a proportionate increase in the effective demand of the final consumer, vindicating Tugan-Baranovskii's belief that production rather than consumer demand is crucial for expansion. It would appear, political overtones apart, that his analysis may be of value to developing countries in the early stages of industrialization. There is, however, the danger that the expansion of producer-goods industries will be carried out too consistently or too long, for reasons of strategy or prestige. When Tugan-Baranovskii's work became known in its German translation, it was at once acclaimed as a positive contribution to business-cycle theory. Werner Sombart (1904) called Tugan-Baranovskii the father of new cycle theory. Arthur Spiethoff, Gustav Cassel, Ludwig Pohle, and many others are known to have been influenced by Tugan-Baranovskii's theory and to have used it as the point of departure for their studies of the causation of crises. In the Treatise on Money, Keynes indicated his strong sympathy "with that school of writers of which Tugan-Baranovskii was the first and the most original" (1930, vol. 2, p. 100). Two writers of such disparate views as Paul M. Sweezy and Joseph A. Schumpeter have stressed the originality of the disproportionality theory. In particular, Schumpeter highlighted the importance of TuganBaranovskifs emphasis on the distinction between the reactions of producer-goods industries and consumer-goods industries to the swings of the cycle (1954, p. 1126). History of Russian industry. Tugan-Baranovskii's second major work, Geschichte der russischen Fabrik (1898), traced the development of largescale industry in Russia since the seventeenth century. He argued that contrary to common belief the industries fostered by Peter the Great were not hothouse growths. They had been preceded by the industries of the seventeenth century, and behind these lay a fairly substantial capital accumulation resulting from the commerce of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. With the underconsumption theories of the Narodniki in mind, Tugan-Baranovskii produced statistics showing that the cyclical
7 66
TUGAN-BARANOVSKII, MIKHAIL I.
fluctuations in Russian industry, above all in the capital-goods industries, were more closely related to cyclical fluctuations in Great Britain than they were to the harvest results in Russia. In his description of the history of cottage industry and its relation to factory production, Tugan-Baranovskii aimed at disposing of the Narodnik idea of the peculiar role of cottage industry in Russia. Yet his research into the Russian factory during the nineteenth century led him to conclusions that could easily be construed as supporting the Narodnik idea that Russia's economy was different from other European economies: he found that while the number of industrial workers had increased, the number of workers per plant was declining compared with the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. However, Tugan-Baranovskii insisted that what was happening in Russia was due to special circumstances that would cease to operate as the economy expanded. Among these circumstances were a shortage of capital, difficulties of transportation that isolated regional markets, and, above all, the low technological level of the individual plant. Where machinery began to be used, as in the spinning industry, the tendency toward dispersal was much less marked. Tugan-Baranovskii argued that the Russian entrepreneur who dispersed production and the Western entrepreneur who concentrated production were prompted by the same capitalistic motive: both were trying to reduce overhead in order to maximize profit. Soviet writers have ascribed Tugan-Baranovskii's findings to an incorrect interpretation of statistical data that led him to classify many small workshops as factories. Although the statistics at his disposal were far from perfect, it is unlikely that a man of his experience would have made such a fundamental error, especially since his findings played into the hands of the Narodniki. Despite Soviet criticism of Tugan-Baranovskii's theories, Geschichte der russischen Fabrik has been reprinted several times in the Soviet Union. Later views. In the first years of the twentieth century, under the influence of the German criticism of Marxism, the spread of Neo-Kantian philosophy in Russia, and the psychological crisis created by the death of his wife, Tugan-Baranovskii consciously abandoned not only Marxist economics, which he had never fully accepted, but also the general philosophical determinism that Marxism implies. He still called himself a socialist but asserted that he found Utopian socialism more scientific than Marx's scientific socialism. He rejected the concept of class struggle and stressed the im-
portance of moral and psychological factors in social relationships. After the 1905 revolution he concerned himself with such topical questions as land reform, currency problems, and, above all, cooperation. He was the editor of Vestnik kooperatsii and wrote a valuable study on the theory of cooperation (1916). OLGA CRISP [For the historical context of Tugan-Baranovskii's work, see the biography of MARX; for discussion of the subsequent development of his ideas, see BUSINESS CYCLES; INDUSTRY, SMALL; and the biographies of CASSELL; SPIETHOFF.] WORKS BY TUGAN-BARANOVSKII
1890
Uchenie o predel'noi poleznosti khoziaistvennykh blag (The Doctrine of the Marginal Utility of Economic Goods). luridicheskii vestnik 10:192-230. 1891 P. Zh. Prudon, ego zhizn i obshchestvennaia deiatel'nost': Biograficheskii ocherk (P. J. Proudhon, His Life and Social Activity: A Biographical Sketch). St. Petersburg: Erlich. 1892 D. S. Mill: Ego zhizn i ucheno-literaturnaia deiatel'nost' (J. S. Mill: His Life and His Scientific and Literary Activity). St. Petersburg: Pavlenkov. (1894) 1913 Les crises industrielles en Angleterre. 2d ed. Paris: Giard & Briere. -> First published as Promyshlennye krizisy v somemennoi Anglii, ikh prichiny i vliianie na narodnuiu zhizn. 1896 Ekonomicheskii faktor i idei (The Economic Factor and Ideas). Mir Bozhii [1896] no. 4:269-291. (1898) 1900 Geschichte der russischen Fabrik. Zeitschrift fur Social- und Wirthschaftsgeschichte, Erganzungshefte, No. 5-6. Berlin: Felber. -» First published as Russkaia fabrika v proshlom i nastoiashchem. A sixth Russian edition was published in 1934. (1903) 1907 Ocherki iz noveishei istorii politicheskoi ekonomii i sotsializma (Notes From the Recent History of Political Economy and Socialism). 4th ed. St. Petersburg: Aleksandrov. 1904a Bor'ba klassov, kak glavneishee soderzhanie istorii (Class War as the Major Content of History). Mir Bozhii [1904] no. 9:242-259. 1904b Psikhicheskie faktory obshchestvennogo razvitiia (Psychological Factors of Social Development). Mir Bozhii [1904] no. 8:2-28. 1905a Theoretische Grundlagen des Marxismus. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot. -» Published in the same year as Teoriticheskiia osnovy marksizma. 1905b Zemel'naia reforma: Ocherk dvizheniia v pol'zu zemel'noi reformy i prakticheskie vyvody (Land Reform: An Outline of the Land Reform Movement and Practical Conclusions). St. Petersburg: Skorokhodov. (1906) 1910 Modern Socialism in Its Historical Development. London: Sonnenschein. -> First published as Sovremennyi sotsializm v svoem istoricheskom razvitii. (1909) 1918 Osnovy politicheskoi ekonomii (Foundations of Political Economy). 5th ed. Petrograd; Pravo. 1912 K luchshemu budushchemu (Toward a Better Future). St. Petersburg: Energiia. (1916) 1921 Sotsial'nyia osnovy kooperatsii (The Social Bases of Cooperation). 2d ed. Berlin: Knigoizdatel'stvo "Slovo."
TURGOT, ANNE ROBERT JACQUES SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
HANSEN, ALVIN H. (1951) 1964 Business Cycles and National Income. Enl. ed. New York: Norton. -» Contains a detailed summary of Tugan-Baranovskii's business-cycle theory. KINDERSLEY, RICHARD 1962 The First Russian Revisionists: A Study of "Legal Marxism" in Russia. Oxford: Clarendon. KONDRATIEFF, N. D. 1923 Mikhail Ivanovich TuganBaranovskii. Petrograd: Izdatel'stvo "Kolos." MENDEL, ARTHUR P. 1961 Dilemmas of Progress in Tsarist Russia: Legal Marxism and Legal Populism. Russian Research Center Studies, No. 43. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. MOISEEV, MOISE 1932 L'evolution d'une doctrine: La theorie des crises de Tougan-Baranovsky et la conception moderne des crises economiques. Revue d'histoire economique et sociale 20:1-43. SCHUMPETER, JOSEPH A. (1954) 1960 History of Economic Analysis. Edited by E. B. Schumpeter. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. SOMBART, WERNER 1904 Die Storungen im deutschen Wirtschaftsleben wahrend den Jahren 1900ff. Verein fur Socialpolitik, Berlin, Schriften 113:121-137. SWEEZY, PAUL M. (1942)1956 The Theory of Capitalist Development: Principles of Marxian Political Economy. New York: Monthly Review Press. VLASENKO, VASILII E. Teorii deneg v Rossii: Konets xix— dooktiabrskii period xx veka. (Monetary Theories in Russia: End of the 19th Century-Pre-October Period of the 20th Century). Izdatel'stvo Kievskogo Univ.
TURGOT, ANNE ROBERT JACQUES Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, baron de 1'Aulne, French economic thinker, was born in Paris in 1727 and died there in 1781. His father had been prevot des marchands (something like head of the guilds), and this led Turgot to an early acquaintance with the bourgeois sector of society and to an intense preoccupation with and a liberal conception of contemporary economic problems. While still a student at the Sorbonne, he had expressed the conviction that reforms were needed to forestall revolution. Called to high office, he endeavored to modernize, and especially to liberalize, the French economy, but his work, which might well have prevented the cataclysm of 1789, was wrecked by vested interests. From 1761 to 1774 Turgot was chief administrative officer (intendant) of the district of Limoges, where he could study the ancien regime at its worst. The main reforms which he tried to effect were abolition of collective responsibility for the prestation of the tax called taille; adjusting the tax burden to ability to pay; replacement of the forced road-building and road-repair service (corvee} by paid work financed by monetary contributions; and a parallel change in the ancient obligation to trans-
1 67
port troops. During the hunger crisis of the years 1769 to 1771, Turgot tried to prevail on the landed proprietors and rich farmers to keep on their laborers and maintain them until the next harvest, and he set up the Bureaux de Charite, through which the workless could find employment. When Louis xvi came to the throne in 1774, he called the energetic reformer into his ministry and soon gave him the key position of controleur general (minister of finance, trade, and public works). Turgot immediately freed the grain trade inside France from all interprovincial obstacles. Unfortunately, the harvest was exceptionally bad that year, and bread riots developed (known to history as the guerre des farines} that had to be put down by force. This was an inauspicious prelude to Turgot's most daring move, the so-called six edicts of 1776. Two of these enactments were downright revolutionary, one not only commuted the road-building services throughout France but, unlike the earlier reform in the Limousin, put the financial burden on the hitherto tax-free nobility; the other dissolved the guilds (maitrises and jurandes}, thus destroying the old trade monopolies and introducing the principle of free enterprise. These bitterly resented and resisted attacks on privilege were combined with enforcement of the strictest economy in public expenditure, all of which alienated the court and ultimately even the king. On May 12, 1776, Turgot was dismissed, and within a few weeks his legislation was very largely revoked. Albert Sorel characterized Turgot's short intervention as a demonstration both of the need for reforms and of the inability of the monarchy to carry them out (Sorel 1885, p. 213). Turgot's theoretical bent can be seen from the fact that his edicts were preceded by preambles outlining their theoretical justification. His basic attitude was formed by two influences, that of the reform mercantilist Vincent de Gournay and that of the physiocrat Quesnay. His most successful book, Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Riches, which was published in 1769-1770, shows him as a physiocrat rather than as a reform mercantilist, but it is possible that the existing version was edited by the physiocrat Du Pont de Nemours. It was in any case characteristic of Turgot to speak of artisans and traders as a salaried, rather than a sterile, class. In his analysis of distribution, rent is equated with the physiocratic produit net. Wages are said to tend toward the minimum of subsistence. In the discussion of profits, stress is laid on the volume of real savings as the primary determinant of the
I 68
TURNER, FREDERICK JACKSON
rate of interest and on the presence of a risk premium as an important secondary ingredient. There is an occasional indication (although not in the Reflections') that Turgot was aware of the interdependence of prices, incomes, and population figures, and of the economy's inherent tendency toward equilibrium. In monetary theory Turgot was a defender of the metalist position. It proves his weakness as a thinker, however, that he could in one paragraph assert the impossibility of conventional money and in the next speak of using cowrie shells and apricot stones as the media of circulation. Turgot acknowledged that labor, as well as land, is productive, and at times he presented rudiments of a labor theory of value. He may therefore be regarded as a link in the chain from Locke to Marx and, more particularly, as figuring in the transition from Petty, Hutcheson, and Hume to Adam Smith (whom, incidentally, he met in 1765). In his more programmatic writings, notably "Memoire sur les prets d'argent" (1770a) and "Lettres sur la liberte du commerce des grains" (177 Qb}, Turgot advocated laissez-faire as the panacea for all ills. When he spoke of freedom, he usually spoke in superlatives. It is surprising to find so extreme and doctrinaire an attitude in a man of Turgot's wide practical experience, but it is a fact that he did not manage to combine his philosophical convictions with a sober sense of political possibilities and limitations. His failure was, in the last analysis, due to his belief that it would be possible to remove in a few days what had been growing for centuries. WERNER STARK [For the historical context of Turgot's work, see ECONOMIC THOUGHT, article on PHYSIOCRATIC THOUGHT; LAISSEZ-FAIRE; and the biographies of HUME; LOCKE; PETTY; QUESNAY; for discussion of the subsequent development of Turgot's ideas, see the biographies of MARX; SMITH, ADAM.] WORKS BY TURGOT
(1769-1770) 1898 Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Riches, 1770. New York: Macmillan. -> First published as Reflexions sur la formation et la distribution des richesses. (1770a) 1919 Memoire sur les prets d'argent. Volume 3, pages 154-202 in Turgot, Oeuvres de Turgot et documents le concernant. Paris: Alcan. (1770&) 1919 Lettres sur la liberte du commerce des grains. Volume 3, pages 386, 393-398 in Turgot, Oeuvres de Turgot et documents le concernant. Paris: Alcan. The Life and Writings of Turgot, Comptroller-general of France, 1774-1776. Edited by W. Walker Stephens. London: Longmans, 1895. Oeuvres de Mr. Turgot, ministre d'etat, precedees et accom-
pagnees de memoires et de notes sur sa vie, son administration et ses ouvrages. Edited by P.-S. Du Pont de Nemours. 9 vols. Paris: Belin, 1808-1811. Oeuvres de Turgot. 2 vols. Collection des principaux economistes, Nos. 3 and 4. Paris: Guillaumin, 1844. Oeuvres de Turgot et documents le concernant, avec biographie et notes par G. Schelle. 5 vols. Paris: Alcan, 1913-1923. Textes choisis. Edited by Pierre Vigreux. Paris: Dalloz, 1947. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
DAKIN, DOUGLAS (1939) 1965 Turgot and the Ancien Regime in France. New York: Octagon. FAURE, EDGAR 1961 La disgrace de Turgot, 12 mai 1776. Paris: Gallimard. GIGNOUX, CLAUDE-JOSEPH 1945 Turgot. Paris: Fayard. SOREL, ALBERT 1885 L'Europe et la Revolution francaise. Vol. 2. Paris: Plon. WEDDIGEN, WALTER 1950 Anne Robert Jacques Turgot: Leben und Bedeutung des Finanzministers Ludwigs XVI; Unter Abdruck seiner noch heute wichtigen Schriften. Bamberg (Germany): Meisenbach.
TURNER, FREDERICK JACKSON Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932), American historian and originator of the "frontier" and "sectional" interpretations of United States history, was born in semipioneer conditions at Portage, Wisconsin. At the University of Wisconsin, where he earned his bachelor's degree in 1884 and his master's degree in 1888, he fell under the influence of William Francis Allen, a remarkable teacher who taught his young pupil the critical use of documents, instilled in him a belief in scientific method and multiple causation, and converted him to the view of society as a constantly evolving organism. His one year, 1888-1889, at the Johns Hopkins University, which awarded him a doctorate in 1890, was less fruitful, although his interest in economic history was quickened by Richard T. Ely and in nationalism by Woodrow Wilson. Turner took less kindly to the teachings of his principal instructor, Herbert Baxter Adams, who argued that all American institutions had evolved from "germs" in medieval Germany. Years later he wrote Carl Becker that his historical career "was pretty much a reaction from that due to my indignation" (Turner Papers, Henry E. Huntington Library, TU Box 34). The results of Turner's intellectual rebellion were three remarkable essays prepared during his first years at Wisconsin, where he became a professor after Allen's premature death in 1889. In "The Significance of History" ([1891k] 1961, pp. 11-27) he set forth his historical credo, pleading for the use of scientific and interdisciplinary tech-
TURNER, FREDERICK JACKSON niques, arguing for the production of "usable" studies pertinent to present-day problems, setting forth in classic form the doctrine of relativism, and urging the study of all phases of human behavior rather than politics alone. Within a few pages Turner had anticipated the "New History" and presented sound arguments for most of the philosophical and methodological innovations popularized since that time. His second essay, "Problems in American History" ([1892] 1961, pp. 28-36), demanded a new approach to the study of the American past: historians must look behind institutional and constitutional forms to discover "the vital forces that call these organs into life and shape them to meet changing conditions"; they must use the tools of natural scientists to determine the impact of physical conditions on national growth; and they must weigh the relative influence of the environment and the European heritage in shaping the distinctive features of the civilization of the United States. The third paper, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" ([1893] 1961, pp. 3762), read at a meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago in 1893, isolated the segment of the past that he had himself chosen to investigate and explain. Many of the distinctive features noticeable in American traits and institutions, he believed, stemmed from a unique environment and particularly from the presence of a receding frontier. "The existence of an area of free land," he wrote, "its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development" (1920, p. 1). The repeated rebirth of civilization among pioneers whose cultural patterns were disrupted by contact with raw nature and by mingling with other settlers from different backgrounds helped endow the American people with characteristics and values different from those of their European ancestors. Among these Turner listed coarseness and strength, an inventive turn of mind, physical and social mobility, a restless energy, a strong spirit of selfreliance, dominant individualism, an emphasis on materialism, and, especially, a quickened faith in democracy and the national destiny. On the frontier, he insisted, an "Americanization" of men and institutions took place. From the turn of the century to the 1930s the frontier interpretation dominated historical thought. Disciples less cautious than their master explained every phase of the American past, from literature to politics, as a result of the pioneering experience, converting the American Historical Association into one big "Turnerverein." Turner himself was
1 69
elevated to the pinnacle of his profession: universities sought his services, and his fellow historians made him president of their national association in 1910. When he finally left Wisconsin for Harvard University that year, he did so only as a protest against the anti-intellectual tendencies of some of the Wisconsin regents who seemed to be threatening scholarship in its pure forms. In the meantime his own interests had turned to a second explanation of the uniqueness of the American past: the sectional hypothesis. As population moved westward, he reasoned, successive geographic regions were occupied, each differing from the others in climate, soil, topography, and other natural conditions. And as each of these "sections" developed economic enterprises suitable to its environment, it sought to shape national legislation for its own benefit. Turner believed that the political history of the United States could be understood only as a series of adjustments and compromises between sectional interests. This was the view he stressed in the one book he completed during his lifetime, Rise of the New West: 18191829 (1906) and in the volume that occupied his remaining years and was published posthumously, The United States, 1830-1850: The Nation and Its Sections (1935). Turner retired from Harvard University in 1924 to dedicate full time to this study, living first in Madison, then in 1927 moving to a post as senior research associate at the Henry E. Huntington Library. His death in 1932 spared him knowledge of the assault on his theories that gained momentum during the 1930s and continued for two decades. Younger historians, rebelling against concepts that stressed ruralism and nationalism in an age of mechanization and internationalism, charged him with distorting American values by overstressing the distinctive features of the nation's past and labeled him a monocausationist and geographic determinist. This wave of anti-Turnerism ran its course by the 1950s. It has been followed by a new period in which scholars in several disciplines have begun testing aspects of his frontier hypothesis, a process seemingly destined to continue for many years before the exact effect of the pioneering experience can be appraised. The frontier is today accepted by historians as one—but only one—of the many forces responsible for America's civilization, a judgment with which Turner would have thoroughly agreed. RAY A. BILLINGTON [For the historical context of Turner's work, see the biographies of LORIA and ROBINSON.]
1 70
TYLOR, EDWARD BURNETT WORKS BY TURNER
189la The Character and Influence of the Indian Trade in Wisconsin: A Study of the Trading Post as an Institution. Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, 9th ser., Nos. 11-12. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. (1891&) 1961 The Significance of History. Pages 11-27 in Frederick Jackson Turner, Frontier and Section: Selected Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. (1892) 1961 Problems in American History. Pages 28-36 in Frederick Jackson Turner, Frontier and Section: Selected Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. (1893) 1961 The Significance of the Frontier in American History. Pages 37-62 in Frederick Jackson Turner, Frontier and Section: Selected Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. (1906) 1961 Rise of the New West: 1819-1829. Gloucester, Mass.: Smith. -» A paperback edition, which has a new foreword and a bibliography by Ray Allen Billington, was published in 1962 by Collier. 1912 TURNER, FREDERICK JACKSON; CHANNING, EDWARD; and HART, ALBERT B. Guide to the Study and Reading of American History. Boston: Ginn. (1920) 1963 The Frontier in American History. New York: Holt. (1932) 1950 The Significance of Sections in American History. Gloucester, Mass: Smith. ->• Essays edited by Max Farrand and Avery Craven. (1935) 1950 The United States, 1830-1850. With an introduction by Avery Craven. Gloucester, Mass.: Smith. -> Published posthumously. The Early Writings of Frederick Jackson Turner. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1938. Frederick Jackson Turner's Legacy: Unpublished Writings in American History. Edited by Wilbur R. Jacobs. San Marino (Calif.): Huntington Library, 1965. Frontier and Section: Selected Essays. With an introduction by Ray Allen Billington. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1961. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
BECKER, CARL 1927 Frederick Jackson Turner. Pages 273-318 in Howard W. Odum (editor), American Masters of Social Science: An Approach to the Study of the Social Sciences Through a Neglected Field of Biography. New York: Holt. BENSON, LEE 1960 Turner and Beard: American Historical Writing Reconsidered. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. BILLINGTON, RAY A. 1962a Young Fred Turner. Wisconsin Magazine of History 46:38-48. BILLINGTON, RAY A. 1962b Frederick Jackson Turner Comes to Harvard. Massachusetts Historical Society, Proceedings 74:51-83. BILLINGTON, RAY A. 1966 America's Frontier Heritage. New York: Holt. CRAVEN, AVERY 1937 Frederick Jackson Turner. Pages 252-270 in The Marcus W. Jernegan Essays in American Historiography. Edited by William T. Hutchinson. Univ. of Chicago Press. CURTI, MERLE 1931 The Section and the Frontier in American History: The Methodological Concepts of Frederick Jackson Turner. Pages 353-367 in Social Science Research Council, Committee on Scientific Method in the Social Sciences, Methods in Social Science: A Case Book. Univ. of Chicago Press. CURTI, MERLE (1949) 1961 Frederick Jackson Turner. Pages 175-204 in Wisconsin State Historical Society, Wisconsin Witness to Frederick Jackson Turner: A
Collection of Essays on the Historian and the Thesis. Madison: The Society. HARPER, N. D. 1951 Turner the Historian: "Hypothesis" or "Process"? With Special Reference to Frontier Society in Australia. University of Kansas City Review 18:76-86. JACOBS, WILBUR R. 1954 Frederick Jackson Turner: Master Teacher. Pacific Historical Review 23:49-58. MOOD, FULMER 1939 The Development of Frederick Jackson Turner as a Historical Thinker. Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Transactions 34:283-352. MOOD, FULMER 1951 The Origin, Evolution, and Application of the Sectional Concept: 1750-1900. Pages 5-98 in Merrill Jensen (editor), Regionalism in America. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press.
TYLOR, EDWARD BURNETT Sir Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917), the English evolutionary anthropologist, was born in London in the year of the Reform Bill. What little we know of his early years and family background places him squarely within the social milieu of the mid-Victorian liberal middle class. Son of a Quaker brassfounder, Tylor was educated along with the sons of other successful Quaker businessmen at Grove House in Tottenham. At 16, he was taken from school to join the family firm. His entrance into the business world coincided with the end of a thirty-year period of social instability, and he soon witnessed that symbolic triumph of middle-class endeavor, laissez-faire policy, and English civilization: the Great Exhibition of 1851 (at which his elder brother Alfred was a juror). Four years later, symptoms of consumption forced his withdrawal from business. Supported by "a modest competence," he was thenceforth to devote his life to travel and study and to participate in the life of the English intellectual aristocracy that by 1860 had developed from prospering Evangelical and Nonconformist families. To "Anahuac" and ethnology. To improve his health, Tylor left England in 1855 for an American tour. Riding on a Havana omnibus the following spring he encountered Henry Christy, a middleaged Quaker banker who was indulging his ethnological and antiquarian interests on an extended trip through the New World. Their acquaintance led to a four-month excursion in Mexico. Christy spent his time enlarging his collection of antiquities, while Tylor observed the details of Mexican daily life and custom. But although the Mexican excursion may have given his Wanderjahr something of the character of an anthropological field trip, Tylor's awareness of his vocation seems to have developed only gradually. Aside from the facts that in 1858 he married
TYLOR, EDWARD BURNETT Anna Fox and that he spent time traveling in Europe, we know little of the years in which Tylor's ethnological interests were germinating. But for men of antiquarian and ethnological bents like Christy and Tylor, it was a period of intense excitement. The years 1858 and 1859 witnessed not only the publication of the Darwinian theory, but also the discovery of flint tools in association with extinct animals at Brixham Cave in Devonshire and the confirmation by British investigators of Jacques Boucher de Perthes's similar findings in the Somme Valley. The net effect was the opening of a new vista on the antiquity of man and the meaning of contemporary "savagery." Christy's previously diffuse antiquarianism found a more exact focus in what his necrologists called "the close resemblance between the lost races of primitive man and the savage life of our own time." Christy was active in the revival of the Ethnological Society of London, whose meetings Tylor had begun to attend by 1862. In the years before his death in 1865, Christy participated with the noted French archeologist Edouard Lartet in an extended excavation of caves in the Dordogne Valley. In view of Tylor's acknowledged debt to Christy and his later comment that he had followed "all the details of [Christy's] ethnological researches in these years," it seems reasonable to infer that Tylor was stimulated by the same events and motivated by the same purpose along a parallel path from incidental ethnography to theoretical ethnology (see Gruber 1965; Burrow 1966). In 1861 Tylor published an account of his Mexican trip. For the most part, Anahuac is simply a well-wrought travelogue. Nevertheless, certain characteristics of the future anthropologist are already apparent: the book has a vivid sense of cultural differences, an intermittent concern with ethnological controversies, glimpses of the later concept of "survival," and a cautious, empirical, and rudimentary anthropological relativism mixed unashamedly with a humane but assured ethnocentrism. Tylor was preoccupied by the backward, illiberal, unEnglish elements in Mexican life, and he ended his book by predicting the ultimate absorption of Mexico by the United States. Although Tylor published little in the early 1860s, he was busy moving beyond the ethnological asides of Anahuac to the more systematic Researches Into the Early History of Mankind, which he published in 1865. The late 1860s were a period of intense activity for him, and in 1871 the ideas on the evolution of religion and culture that he had sketched in a number of articles and lectures were given full elaboration in his two-
171
volume masterwork, Primitive Culture. This was his major anthropological contribution, and it was recognized the same year by his election as a fellow of the Royal Society. Positive science and religious orthodoxy. Published at the end of a decade of polemics about evolution, Primitive Culture is as much a cultural document as a scientific study. It can be understood only in relation to the major intellectual controversies of the third quarter of the nineteenth century. From 1830 on, Christian orthodoxy suffered a series of blows that eventually undermined not only belief in the inspiration and literal sense of the Bible and in the uniqueness of man as a vessel for a God-given soul, but also the more general, active, providential conception of nature, which largely governed the thinking of British scientists until 1859. From Sir Charles Lyell's statement of the principle of uniformitarianism in the early 1830s, through Robert Chambers' popular evolutionism and J. S. Mill's confident reassertion in the early 1840s of the principle that the actions of human beings are subject to invariable laws, through Darwin's implicit denial of God's intervention in the history of nature and the polemic over the "ape theory" in the 1860s, and on down to the declaration of warfare on religion by Tyndall and others in the 1870s, what was at first simply a fault line between different religious points of view within science widened into what seemed to many a chasm between science and religion. Tylor was a young member of the generation of Thomas Huxley and Tyndall. Primitive Culture was, among other things, a rationalist assault on the very stronghold of religious orthodoxy: the divine inspiration of religious belief. As Tylor later expressed it in doggerel: Theologians all to expose— Tis the mission of Primitive Man. (Lang & Tylor 1883) Indeed, the foci of Tylor's anthropology—the applicability of scientific method to the study of man, man's great prehistoric antiquity, and man's development along progressive, uniformitarian rather than degenerational, providential lines—were all subjects of heated debate. It is in this broad context of the reassertion and development of the rationalist principles of the Enlightenment against the waning power of the early nineteenth-century religious revival that Tylor's work must be understood. Sources of Tylor's thought. Quaker humanitarianism was a major factor in the emergence of English ethnology in the 1830s; in Tylor's case the
1 72
TYLOR, EDWARD BURNETT
Quaker heritage expressed itself primarily in intellectual terms. The early nineteenth century was a period of Quaker decline in England, as the sons and daughters of the Quaker well-to-do broke down the barriers of the rigidified antiformalism that isolated them from the middle class at large. Some moved toward evangelicalism or the Church of England; others, following Mill's injunction to pursue the argument wherever it might lead, moved toward rationalism. Tylor took the latter course, but the traditional Quaker antagonism to systematic theology undoubtedly colored his conception of the "mission" of primitive man. This mission was of course evolutionist as well as antitheological: From a status like that of the Crees Our society's fabric arose. (Lang & Tylor 1883) However, Tylor's evolutionism was no simple reflection of Darwin's Origin, although his work was quickly incorporated into the body of Darwinian evolutionary thought. Tylor was also close to prehistoric archeology, and his brother Alfred was a geologist. But although he was undoubtedly much affected by recent advances in these fields, we must look beyond them for the roots of his uniformitarian search for prehistoric origins. There may have been German influences: Tylor knew comparative philology, especially as Anglicized by Max Miiller, and he had read Gustav Klemm's Allgemeine Culturgeschichte der Menschheit. But Klemm's cultural evolutionism was only part of a tradition that was more directly available to Tylor, who was, in any event, "not really happy with foreign tongues" (Lowie 1937, p. 13; Marett 1936, p. 28). The ultimate source of Tylor's evolutionism is suggested rather by his illuminating reference to the empiricism of Mill's System of Logic (Tylor 1871, vol. 1, p. 218); by his clear debt to Auguste Comte, whose theories Mill had introduced to England in 1844; and perhaps most revealingly, by the motto from Charles de Brosses's 1760 work, DM culte de dieux fetiches, on the title page of Primitive Culture-. "It is not in his possibilities, it is in man himself that man should be studied. The issue is not to imagine what he might have or ought to have done, but to look at what he does." Here is the germ of the uniformitarian view that the causal forces of the past are those visible in the present. Indeed, here is foreshadowed the social evolutionist conception that the development of all human social groups (composed as they are of beings with a common nature) normally follows a single gradual progressive pattern of development out of the natu-
ral state, that the rate of this progress is subject to circumstantial retardation, and that the stages of human development from savagery to European civilization can therefore be reconstructed scientifically beyond the reach of historical evidence by comparing the institutions of human groups coexisting in the present and arranging them in a sequence of "natural" development on the basis of their similarity to western European forms. Rooted in classical thought and Cartesian philosophy, this social evolutionary point of view was developed by the social scientists of the French and Scottish Enlightenment—Turgot, Condorcet, Ferguson, Smith. The evidence of racial diversity and the arguments of religious "degenerationists" tended in the first half of the nineteenth century to undermine the developmentalist assumption that all men share a uniform psychic nature that expresses itself in universal progress. Nevertheless, it was transmitted through this "period of doubt" and reasserted in the 1850s and 1860s by various writers who may loosely be termed "positivist"—among them Henry T. Buckle, Herbert Spencer, and, of course, Tylor. For these men, the assumption that civilized society has evolved by natural processes from origins similar to existing "savagery" was at once intellectual baggage and a polemical platform (see Bock 1956; Burrow 1966). Historical and "comparative" methods. Although his social evolutionism can be traced to eighteenthcentury roots, Tylor was affected also by the more orthodox historicism of the romantic period, which was concerned with re-creating the actual sequences of historical change rather than with deriving scientific laws of historical development. This historicism was reflected in the ethnological societies founded around 1840. They were more "diffusionist" than evolutionist; indeed; their central concern was the "origin and diffusion of the races of mankind." When, in the late 1860s, Tylor moved toward a more systematic evolutionism, he was in fact rebuked by the president of the Ethnological Society of London (Burrow 1966, pp. 122-123). Perhaps as a result of his contact with the ethnological tradition, Tylor's first major work, Researches Into the Early History of Mankind, escaped the frequent tendency of positivist social theory to subordinate historical fact to nomothetic ends. On the contrary, this work was largely an attempt to delineate the range of application of two methods in the study of civilization—the systematic comparison of like phenomena and detailed reconstruction of specific historical sequences. On the one hand, Tylor argued that detailed history is unnecessary "when a general law can be
TYLOR, EDWARD BURNETT inferred from a group of facts" (1865, p. 3). Over half the book was an application of the "comparative method" in seeking the origins of language, magic, and myth. Thus, the essential similarity of cultural manifestations among various tribes suggested to Tylor that gesture language and picture writing are "direct products of the human mind" under certain conditions and that magic is the outcome of the "very simple mental law" by which the untutored human mind tends to confuse objective phenomena with their associated subjective manifestations (names, images, and so forth). On the other hand, most of the phenomena of culture have "traveled [too] far from their causes" to be approached so directly in terms of general psychological laws. To trace their development the ethnologist must piece together their actual histories, yet without written records. Relying on the indirect evidence of "antiquities," Tylor demonstrated the world-wide progress from stone to metal and from fire drill to flint. But he argued that the use of such other materials of "culture history" as language and mythology depends on first answering the question whether similarities of custom and art result from independent invention by like minds in like conditions or from transmission and diffusion by blood relationship and social intercourse. Although he made abundant use of the data of independent invention to infer general laws of the mind, Tylor argued that such data have "no historical value whatever." His goal was rather to separate these data from the data of diffusion, to distinguish myths based on the observation or personification of natural phenomena—which recur independently all over the world among groups historically unconnected—from myths whose similarities are better explained by diffusion, and from actual historical traditions. When this was done, he could get on with the real job of using these actual historical traditions to reconstruct the course of man's early history, a process he felt would eventually tie together many races "whose history even the evidence of Language has not succeeded in bringing into connexion" (1865, p. 368). But although Tylor's Researches thus subordinated the "comparative method" of developmentalist social theory to the goal of specific historical reconstruction, he nevertheless offered support for several developmentalist assumptions that the racial heterodoxies and the religious orthodoxies of the pre-Darwinian nineteenth century had brought sharply under attack. The many evidences for independent invention buttressed the argument for the psychic and genetic unity of man against the polygenist argument that various groups of men
173
were aboriginally distinct and unequal species, some of them incapable of progress. And in general, his Researches supported the developmentalist position against the attacks of religious orthodoxy. "Degenerationists" like Archbishop Whately had argued that savagery was the end product of decline rather than the starting point of progress and that no savage had ever advanced or could ever advance unaided to civilization. Granting that the early condition of the human mind was not exactly represented in any living tribe, Tylor argued that his Researches showed that the similarity was sufficient to justify the use of existing savage tribes as a basis "to reason upon." Furthermore, his consideration of the "Growth and Decline of Culture" (1865, pp. 252-290) showed that on the whole the history of mankind has been one of progressive development. Doctrine of survival and theory of animism. Although ostensibly carrying the Researches into other branches of thought and belief, art and custom, the purpose and method of Primitive Culture are in fact rather different. The change in focus is related to the scientific and religious controversies of the 1860s. Tylor's "Remarks on Language and Mythology as Departments of Biological Science" shows that his evolutionism, while rooted in an earlier tradition of social thought, was not unrelated to contemporary developments in biology. Here, Tylor argued that the "details of human culture should come under discussion as topics of biology, where . . . they must be treated as facts to be classified and referred to uniform and consistent laws" (1868, p. 120). During this period, the older attack against developmentalism fused with the anti-Darwinian polemic. Orthodox religionists argued that the moral or cultural qualities that distinguish man from beast are subject to neither the laws of progress and natural selection nor the jurisdiction of science. Given Tylor's strong commitment to both science and progress, it is not surprising that he took up the challenge. Primitive Culture was an attempt to demonstrate that human culture and above all human religion are products of a natural, regular, continuous, progressive, and law-abiding evolution of the mental capacities of the human animal in the social state and that this evolution is a proper subject of scientific study. In this context, Tylor's interest in the data of independent invention changed. Rather than separating out the products of psychic unity so that he might study man's history, he used them to demonstrate progress and to establish a "science of culture" based on the classification and comparison of ethnological facts (Smith 1933, pp. 116-183).
1 74
TYLOR, EDWARD BURNETT
The basic tool of the science of culture was the "comparative method," buttressed against the attacks of the degenerationists by Tylor's "doctrine of survivals" (1871, vol. 1, pp. 63-144). Antiquarians had long been fascinated by the irrationality and superstition in the folklore of European peasant life. But to Tylor's eminently rationalist mind, everything in the world of culture was intelligible because it had been created by intelligent men. Applying an archeological analogy, he treated old ideas as mutilated artifacts of an earlier stage of intellectual development. Thus he made European peasantry a link between savage man and civilized society and at the same time created a methodological tool of general applicability (Hodgen 1936). As Andrew Lang later suggested, the ethnologist was no longer compelled to seek reason where none existed: "The most irrationalseeming customs were the product of reason like our own, working on materials imperfectly apprehended, and under stress of needs which it is our business to discover, though they have faded from the memories of the advanced savages of today" [1907, p. 12; see also the biography of LANG]. Because man's reason did not advance at the same pace all over the world, it is possible to trace the spiritual culture of European man backward, through successive vestiges of past reason surviving in later ages as superstition, to a level analogous to that of contemporary savages. While Tylor's major methodological contribution in the late 1860s was the doctrine of survivals, his major theoretical contribution was the related concept of animism. Animism was religion in its minimal, most primitive, and, therefore, broadest form— "the belief in Spiritual Beings." As Tylor himself indicated, the idea can be traced back through Comte to de Brosses's notion of "fetishism." Tylor, however, went behind their idea that "man conceived of all external bodies as animated by a life analogous to his own" to the basis of this tendency within man himself, arguing that "a conception of the Human Soul is a crude but reasonable inference by primitive man from obvious phenomena"— dreams and visions, life and death. Simultaneously, "the notion of a ghost-soul as the animating principle of man" is "extended by easy steps to souls of lower animals, and even of lifeless objects" to provide a "complete philosophy of Natural Religion." The major part of Primitive Culture is an attempt, using the evidence of recurrence and survival, to trace the evolution of religious belief forward to the "outcome of the Animistic Philosophy" in the great monotheistic religions (1871; 1877, pp. 142, 145).
The sense of social conservatism that prevented some Victorian intellectuals from making more forthright attacks on religion was, in a way, built right into Tylor's evolutionary scheme. Religion and morality, unrelated in the state of savagery, become linked in the higher stages of civilization through the idea of retribution in a future life. But Tylor did not accept this linkage as irrevocable. On the contrary, he thought it possible that a "positive morality . . . shall of its own force control the acts of men" (1871, vol. 2, p. 407). Explicitly opposing animism to "materialism," he saw human cultural development as a "long-waged contest between the theory of animation which accounts for each phenomenon of nature by giving it everywhere a life like our own, and a slowly-growing natural science which in one department after another substitutes for independent voluntary action the working out of systematic law" (1866, p. 83). Within this context, the doctrines of animism and survival took on broader significance, and the "science of culture" became "essentially a reformer's science," exposing and marking out for destruction "the remains of crude old culture which have passed into harmful superstition" (1871, vol. 2, p. 410). Despite the focus on evolutionary origins and stages, which shunted the study of historical diffusion into the background in Primitive Culture, and despite its nomothetic and polemical purposes, Tylor's method did not lend itself to the ridicule which orthodox historians heaped on certain other practitioners of the "comparative method." Tylor rarely allowed his cultural preconceptions or his nomothetic purpose to override his evidence; he always retained a deep commitment to the "canons of sober historical criticism"; he never lost the historian's touch with documentary material. Continuity of Tylor's anthropology. Although Tylor was active in anthropology for more than three decades after 1871, his theoretical work in that period was largely reiterative. His only other book, Anthropology (1881), a popular introduction to the field, was a demonstration of the fact of evolution in each of the various aspects of human culture. His developmentalist commitment is evident in most of his later work. In the 1890s he wrote a series of articles on the Tasmanians as representatives of paleolithic man, explicitly shoring up once again one of the basic assumptions of the "comparative method." Two aspects of Tylor's later work are, however, particularly worthy of note. In the late 1870s he turned again to a question he had touched on in Anahuac and which continued to occupy him on and off through 1896—the origins of civilization
TYLOR, EDWARD BURNETT in the New World. In 1861 he had been inclined to regard this civilization largely as an independent growth (1861, p. 104; cf. p. 243, p. 280). Now, having established the fundamental similarity between the Aztec game patolli and Indian pachisi, he concluded that this and other elements suggested that Mexican civilization was "in large measure" the result of Asian influence (1878, p. 128). But despite his renewed interest in historical diffusion, Tylor's interest in developmentalism remained strong until his death. His most significant later work was a dramatic reassertion of the possibility of establishing a science of culture; he titled it "On a Method of Investigating the Development of Institutions: Applied to Laws of Marriage and Descent" (1888). Here he summarized data on 350 peoples in tabular form so as to note the "adhesions" between such customs as avoidance, couvade, and matrilocal or patrilocal residence. Tylor argued that the total pattern of more-thanchance associations revealed in his tables supported the by-then traditional picture of an evolution from maternal to paternal institutions. But despite this "unilinear" evolutionist conclusion, Tylor regarded his study primarily as a methodological exercise illustrating the possibilities of applying statistics to anthropology. Although Sir Francis Galton attacked the logical basis of the whole procedure by noting the possibility of historical connections between the various tribes that Tylor treated as independent units, the article did in fact have an important impact, and the issues Galton raised are still debated today. [See ETHNOLOGY.] Tylor's failure to complete any major anthropological work after 1881 has been attributed to his preoccupation with the organization and propagation of anthropological science. He was twice president of the Royal Anthropological Institute and an important contributor to the successive editions of Notes and Queries on Anthropology prepared for "the use of travellers and residents in uncivilized lands." In 1884 his address as first president of the anthropological section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science provided the stimulus for a study of the tribes of the Northwest Coast of Canada. Although Tylor was for 12 years the chairman of the supervising committee, it was Franz Boas who did the field work, achieving thereby his extensive professional competence as an anthropologist. In 1883 Tylor was appointed keeper of the University Museum at Oxford and from then on was busy with the supervision and expansion of the Pitt-Rivers collection of cultural artifacts. The following year he began regular lectures at the museum, first as
175
reader and then, from 1896 until his retirement in 1909, as Oxford's first professor of anthropology. In 1907 Andrew Lang mentioned that he was looking forward to the completion of a "great work" with which Tylor had been "long occupied." However, the years until Tylor's death in 1917 were a period of mental decline, and the book was never finished. It was apparently intended to be a reworking of the Gifford lectures which Tylor had given between 1889 and 1891. The detailed outline of these lectures in the annotated bibliography of Tylor's writings indicates that they covered essentially the same ground as Primitive Culture. Therefore, another reason Tylor did not publish any books in his last decades may have been that he thought he had said all that he had to say on the major issues which concerned him. By 1890 the battle for a broadly evolutionary view of human origins had been won: "the mission of primitive man" had been accomplished. As Tylor himself suggested in a letter to Boas in 1895, the time was at hand for a "reformation" in anthropology. Tylor's influence and contribution. Tylor has been called "the father of anthropology in all its British developments," but this is hardly a precise estimate of his role. Tylor did little in physical anthropology except insofar as the counterweight of his influence may have helped prevent physical anthropology from dominating anthropology in Britain as it did in France in the 1860s. Within the range of his major interests, Tylor's influence in his own lifetime was great, especially on the humanist margin of anthropological study. His major works were widely translated and continuously reprinted until as late as 1920. Andrew Lang and James G. Frazer came to the study of religion through reading Primitive Culture, and the book's ideas continued to influence students of comparative religion on into the twentieth century. The doctrine of survivals gave stimulus and focus to more than a generation of folklorists in England and elsewhere and was employed by scholars in all countries in such varied disciplines as law, economics, literature, and, of course, anthropology. However much Tylor may have helped prepare the acceptance of anthropology, he actually trained few anthropologists, and only at the very end of his tenure at Oxford did anthropology as an organized discipline achieve more than nominal status. And although some of Tylor's technical terminology has been incorporated into the modern study of social structure and aspects of his work have made it easier for British anthropologists to accept the influence of L. H. Morgan and Emile Durkheim, twentieth-century British functionalist social an-
776
TYLOR, EDWARD BURNETT
thropology represents on the whole a sharp break with the Tylorian tradition. It has also been suggested that whereas Morgan founded modern British social anthropology, Tylor founded American cultural anthropology. Insofar as this paradox is based on the assumption that Tylor "invented" the culture concept in its modern anthropological sense, it must be seriously questioned. Despite the famous definition on the first page of Primitive Culture (for discussion, see Stocking 1963), Tylor's idea of culture lacks a number of the central elements of the modern idea of culture—functional integration, cultural relativity, meaningful historicity, and behavioral determinism. In fact, his commitment to the developmentalist "comparative method" tended to inhibit rather than encourage the emergence of these central concepts. True, there are traces of functionalism in Tylor's work, but the very "first step in the study of civilization" involved the fragmentation of human cultures (although Tylor never used the plural) into elements that might be compared, with little regard for context, in order to reconstruct a single evolving human culture. True, Tylor insisted that even what he frequently called "uncultured" savages had systems of morality, religion, and the germs of culture, but his commitment to progress and his anthropological method required that these be in some real sense inferior to European forms. Despite his self-conscious concern with method, there was a point where his method was rooted in the European's inherited assumption of his own superiority. The stages of cultural evolution coexisted in the present. "All that is hypothetical . . . is the sequence in which they are supposed to have arisen one out of another" (1866, p. 85); and as to that, "few would dispute that the following races are arranged rightly in order of culture:—Australian, Tahitian, Aztec, Chinese, Italian" (1871, vol. 1, p. 24). Even an agnostic Quaker could see that the Church of England was a less barbaric form of religion than the Church of Rome (1871, p. 450). Although Tylor emphasized the slowly cumulative continuity of human culture and the tenacity of custom, he had no real theory of the processes of cultural transmission or persistence through time, beyond the notion of nonfunctional survival. Nor did Tylor's concept of culture really take into account the frequently nonrational mechanisms through which a culture "determines" the behavior of its members; on the contrary, it was because Tylor saw culture as above all a matter of conscious, rational processes that he was led into error in the explanation of religious phenomena (Marett 1936). To firmly establish Matthew Arnold's humanist culture as a legitimate
subject of scientific inquiry was no small contribution to the development of anthropology. But the emergence of the modern pluralistic concept required a change both in theoretical orientation and in methodology. When it finally did emerge after 1900, it was in the work of Boas and other men who had rejected an evolutionism that submerged the variety of human cultural manifestations in a single evolving human culture and who devoted themselves to the systematic study of human cultures in the field (Stocking 1966). On the other hand, there is evidence to suggest that Tylor, somewhat paradoxically, did have an important influence on the diffusionist orientations which arose in opposition to evolutionism in the early twentieth century. Paul Radin once suggested that Tylor's study of adhesions was "the corner stone of all distribution studies since his time" (1933, p. 133). Boas' correspondence indicates quite clearly that Tylor's article served as a methodological catalyst for Boas' own statistical investigations of the diffusion of myth elements, to which much of later culture area work may be traced. In the case of Rivers and the British diffusionists, who tended to see Tylor as their main antagonist (Smith 1933), the debt is at best indirect. But it may perhaps be traced through the German diffusionist Graebner, who although critical of Tylor's evolutionism incorporated the notion of adhesions into his own methodology (1911, pp. 86-91, 119). In any case, this important but rather indirect influence had exhausted its force by the 1930s. To judge by current textbooks, Tylor has little to say to anthropology today. The idea of animism is basic to our understanding of religion but not in Tylor's universal terms. The notion of survival has had a hard time surviving in a functionalist milieu. Modern methods of comparison are not the same as Tylor's "comparative method." Now that some anthropologists are turning once again to problems of human evolution, they may find Tylor's works of greater interest. But in reassessing his historical and theoretical significance, it would be well to keep in mind the very different context in which Tylor wrote. He was a nineteenth-century cultural evolutionist. This is not to suggest that he accepted such evolutionist vagaries as the promiscuity of the primitive horde or even that he rejected the diffusion of culture. His primary commitment was to an overall progressionism, not to any specific mechanism of progress. Nomothetic purpose and comparative method may have led him to emphasize independent invention; he nevertheless granted a considerable role to diffusion and even suggested several of the technical criteria of the later diffusionists.
TYPOLOGIES This is not to say that Tylor was in any rigid sense a "unilinear" evolutionist; he admitted that the "history of Culture as a whole" is not the same as "the history of particular tribes" (1865, p. 190). It is rather to suggest that Tylor's overriding purpose was to show that the development of European civilization has been part of an evolutionary process that links it to the processes of nature in the inorganic and subhuman organic realms and that the scientific point of view that applies in these realms is therefore applicable to the study of man. We have long since come to take for granted the burden of Tylor's message. Today we look with a more jaundiced eye at European progress; we are not at all sure that history can be in any easy way subsumed by science; and we have largely rejected historical reconstructions based on the "comparative method." But no anthropologist would doubt that human culture is the product of an evolutionary development linked to the physical evolution of man. GEORGE W. STOCKING, JR. [See also ANTHROPOLOGY, article on THE FIELD; CULTURE; RELIGION, article on ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDY; and the biographies of BOAS; FRAZER; LANG; LEVYBRUHL; MARETT.] WORKS BY TYLOR Freire-Marreco (1907) annotated a bibliography of Tylor's lectures and published writings. Such manuscripts as Tylor left are for the most part in the Pitt-Rivers Museum at Oxford; they consist largely of notebooks and folios of references which he used in teaching and writing. 1861
Anahuac: Or, Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient and Modern. London: Longmans. (1865) 1878 Researches Into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization. 3d ed., rev. London: Murray. -» An abridged paperback edition was published in 1964 by the University of Chicago Press. 1866 The Religion of Savages. Fortnightly Review 6:7186. 1868 Remarks on Language and Mythology as Departments of Biological Science. Pages 120-121 in British Association for the Advancement of Science, Report. London: Murray. (1871) 1958 Primitive Culture: Researches Into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art and Custom. 2 vols. Gloucester, Mass.: Smith. -> Volume 1: Origins of Culture. Volume 2: Religion in Primitive Culture. 1877 Mr. Spencer's "Principles of Sociology." Mind 2: 141-156. 1878 On the Game of Patolli in Ancient Mexico and Its Probably Asiatic Origin. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 8:116131. -> Contains two pages of discussion. (1881) 1907 Anthropology: An Introduction to the Study of Man and Civilization. New York: Appleton. -> An abridged paperback edition was published in 1960 by the University of Michigan Press.
177
(1883) 1888 LANG, ANDREW; and TYLOR, EDWARD B. Double Ballade of Primitive Man. Pages 44-46 in Andrew Lang, XXXII Ballades in Blue China. London: Routledge. (1888) 1961 On a Method of Investigating the Development of Institutions: Applied to Laws of Marriage and Descent. Pages 1-28 in Frank W. Moore (editor), Readings in Cross-cultural Methodology. New Haven: Human Relations Area Files. -> First published in Volume 18 of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
BIDNEY, DAVID 1953 Theoretical Anthropology. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. BOCK, KENNETH E. 1956 The Acceptance of Histories: Toward a Perspective for Social Science. University of California Publications in Sociology and Social Institutions, Vol. 3, No. 1. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press. BURROW, JOHN W. 1966 Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory. Cambridge Univ. Press. FREIRE-MARRECO, BARBARA 1907 A Bibliography of Edward Burnett Tylor From 1861 to 1907. Pages 375409 in Anthropological Essays Presented to Edward Burnett Tylor in Honour of His 75th Birthday. Oxford: Clarendon. GRAEBNER, FRITZ 1911 Methode der Ethnologic. Heidelberg: Winter. GRUBER, J. W. 1965 Brixham Cave and the Antiquity of Man. Pages 377-402 in Melford Spiro (editor), Context and Meaning in Cultural Anthropology. New York: Free Press. HODGEN, MARGARET T. 1936 The Doctrine of Survivals: A Chapter in the History of Scientific Method in the Study of Man. London: Allenson. LANG, ANDREW 1907 Edward Burnett Tylor. Pages 115 in Anthropological Essays Presented to Edward Burnett Tylor in Honour of His 75th Birthday. Oxford: Clarendon. LOWIE, ROBERT H. 1937 The History of Ethnological Theory. New York: Farrar & Rinehart. MARETT, ROBERT RANULPH 1936 Tylor. New York: Wiley. MURPHREE, IDUS L. 1961 The Evolutionary Anthropologists: The Progress of Mankind. American Philosophical Society, Proceedings 105:265-300. RADIN, PAUL 1933 The Method and Theory of Ethnology: An Essay in Criticism. New York: McGraw-Hill. SMITH, G. E. 1933 The Diffusion of Culture. London: Watts. STOCKING, GEORGE W. JR. 1963 Matthew Arnold, E. B. Tylor, and the Uses of Invention. American Anthropologist New Series 65:783-799. STOCKING, GEORGE W. JR. 1966 Franz Boas and the Culture Concept in Historical Perspective. American Anthropologist New Series 68:867-882. W. T.; and T. R. J. 1865 An Obituary Notice of Henry Christy, F.L.S., F.G.S. Geological Magazine 2:287 only.
TYPOLOGIES Taxonomy occupies a vital place in the corpus of any empirical science. Since science is grounded on the assumptions of the orderliness of natural phenomena and the rational apprehension of this
778
TYPOLOGIES
order by man, the systematic classificatory grouping of phenomena and the explication of the rationale for the classification are indeed tantamount to the codification of the existing state of knowledge in a discipline. Typological classification, as a subdivision of taxonomy, has characterized a considerable part of the culture of the social sciences; paradoxically, the notion of types and this method of classification have also been the object of severe methodological and ideological opposition. "Few subjects in taxonomy are understood in more different ways or are more misunderstood than the nature and use of types . . ." (Simpson 1945, p. 28). Formal and methodological aspects A type, as its etymology suggests (from the Greek typos, an impression, a cast, a model) has recurrent, general, distinctive features which are not properties of the individual as such. Those essential features which stamp an aggregate with a certain cachet or physiognomy constitute a type. Since various arrangements of forms may be discerned in any given population, there are no inherent limitations to the number of types which may be used to describe or characterize it. As a formalization of the study of types, typology is thus closely related to morphology, the study of forms. However, the concept of type is more indefinite in some ways. It connotes something broader than the idea of a mold or abstract category which underlies the notion of "form." The notion of type also suggests an entity as a visible manifestation, an external appearance or embodiment which points to an inner or latent state of being; a type has frequently been treated as a symbol whose referent forms part of a more complex, covert reality. A type is analogous to a photographic negative, from which a great number of identical positives can be developed. A typological classification is one in which the fundamental categories of ordering, the types, are inductively arrived at rather than formally deduced a priori; they are taken as "natural" groupings, finite and discrete. The type is the categorical unit which is the focal point of the classification, though considerable attention may be given to categories within the type, which are called subtypes. This implies that in such a classificatory system, more concern will be given to differences between units on the same plane than to similarities found across levels (e.g., there will be greater attention to describing differences between types A, B, and C than to the common denominators they possess which permit them to be subsumed under family 1). These aspects of typologies notwith-
standing, typological classifications may be viewed methodologically as any classificatory system used in qualitative analysis. As a specific instance of the general logic of classification, the typological procedure requires that (a) each and every member of the population studied may be classified in one and only one of the major types delineated, which is equivalent to requiring that the typological classification must be comprehensive and its terms mutually exclusive; ( b ) the dimension(s) which is (are) differentiated into types must be explicitly stated; (c) this dimension must be of central importance for the purpose of the research. Additional methodological criteria for a "good" typological classification would include the criterion of fruitfulness (the typology may have heuristic significance in facilitating the discovery of new empirical entities) and the criterion of parsimony (the fewest meaningful or significant major types possible to cover the largest number of observations). However, categorizing a given population into a few types or subtypes may reduce validity if the variance within single categories or types is thereby unduly increased. Parsimony, therefore, is not always a virtue. The methodological functions and significance of typological classification are basically twofold: codification and prediction. A typology goes beyond sheer description by simplifying the ordering of the elements of a population, and the known relevant traits of that population, into distinct groupings; in this capacity a typological classification creates order out of the potential chaos of discrete, discontinuous, or heterogeneous observations. But in so codifying phenomena, it also permits the observer to seek and predict relationships between phenomena that do not seem to be connected in any obvious way. This is because a good typology is not a collection of undifferentiated entities but is composed of a cluster of traits which do in reality "hang together." Thus there is much affinity between the notion of "type" and the psychological notion of "gestalt," since both derive from a study of apparently natural "wholes" as primary units of observation. Let us assume, therefore, that we have a typological classification of a given population (e.g., chemical elements, plants, political parties) such that three main types—A, B, and C—have been isolated. We have found that with A are associated traits «!, a 2 , a 3 , • • • , an, that with B are associated traits bi, b 2 , b 3 , • • • , b w , and correspondingly with C. Now suppose we come across an element of the population, X, and recognize X to be a representative of type A. We would then be able to pre-
TYPOLOGIES diet with some degree of confidence that we would find in X a significantly higher incidence of traits #!, a2, « 3 , • • • , an than of either of the other two sets. Of course, it would be most gratifying if a concrete X manifested all the traits associated with A; in that case X would be a "pure" specimen and would coincide with the type. Such pure types can only be exceedingly infrequent in a population; indeed, much of the methodological usefulness of typologies lies in their being synthetic constructions from the data so that no specific actual instance or element would be taken for the type itself. It might be further suggested that the more explicitly stated the typology, including the relationships between types, the more the typology functions as a theoretical model. A theoretical model, of which Weber's notion of the "ideal type" is a special case, is useful in its explanation of the virtual tendencies of a system, in light of which actual discrepancies may be investigated. Of course, the construction of a typology (as that of any other theoretical model), including its dimensions, is not dictated by logical considerations but entails, to an important extent, an initial creative act on the part of the researcher. It should be kept firmly in mind that, from a strict scientific point of view, there is no classification of entities by types which is more or less "natural" than any other; nevertheless, the reification of typologies (the feeling that types are not arbitrary but are actually to be found "there") is a frequent temptation and pitfall in the use of such classifications. A set of categories that is, from a scientific viewpoint, essentially arbitrary, may thus come to be confused with something intrinsically real. Once the typology is constructed, more formal rules of procedure are warranted. Thus, each type should be related logically and meaningfully to every other type of the same dimension in the classification. To take a negative example, a typology of men's attitudes toward women which has as female types (1) blonde, (2) faithful, (3) intellectual, (4) plump, has no methodological merit, because the types are not mutually exclusive. Also, the traits associated with each type should have a logical and meaningful coherence with each other. Following these and other rules of procedure of this sort, it is rather easy to construct a typological classification for any order of phenomena—as may be attested by the plethora of ad hoc typologies to be found in the research literature. Yet this very ease of construction may also lead to one of the major shortcomings of typological classification. Classification in general, by structuring the manifold dimensions of concrete experience, also dis-
179
torts it, i.e., it emphasizes discontinuities where subjective experience finds process and continuities. In fact, there are a number of ways in which typological classification may lead to a certain sterility in dealing with concrete phenomena. First, a given member of a population may manifest traits belonging to different sets, so that classifying this member as an instance of only one type (and therefore as being identical to all other such instances) takes on an arbitrary aspect. Ironically, this goes counter to the very spirit of typologizing, which aims at the setting up of "natural" and readily identifiable categories. In other words, though the typological approach is most useful to differentiate meaningfully the aggregates of a population, it lacks the flexibility to deal with individuals on their own merits. Second, typological classification is rarely contextual; the determination of types tends to exclude temporal and spatial considerations. Moreover, the very success and acceptance of a typological classification may, paradoxically, have a stultifying effect on the development of a scientific discipline, if the typological classification "freezes" the level of explanation. Since typologies have much more of a de facto explanatory status in the social sciences (especially sociology and psychology) than in the physical sciences, typological classification must share some of the responsibility for the retardation of more powerful theoretical explanations. In some unguarded moments, researchers may give the impression that typological classification is tantamount to causal explanation. Thus, in describing the state of an individual's behavior, premature reduction of explanation may take the form of the statement "X is a heavy smoker and drinker because he is essentially of the oral-erotic type," or "Y votes Democratic, since he belongs to the working class." To give typological classification this methodological status of being a first cause is to introduce stereotyping as a mode of scientific explanation. It should be seen that to assign an element of a population to a given type is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for explaining the particular attribute(s) and behavior of the individual. To explain away something by assigning it to a type is to short-circuit the explanation of that entity's properties and actions in areas or dimensions different from those covered by the typology but equally significant in other respects. Typological explanation may be of some importance in accounting for nonhuman biological behavior (where there may be discernible species-specific instinctive reactions), but the greater differentiation of humans
180
TYPOLOGIES
that results from the interaction of a complex genetic pool, learning ability, and conscious choice, as well as the historicity of human lives, makes any fixed types of doubtful value in explaining individual human behavior. The capacity of individuals, no less than human groupings, to change significantly (e.g., "conversion" experiences or social revolutions) must be kept firmly in mind by anyone who works with typologies. In brief, even the most elegant and sophisticated typology cannot be taken as an end in itself, but must always be seen as a link in the long chain of scientific understanding. The tradition and its sources In this section will be discussed some of the various intellectual sources which form a background for the typological tradition in the social sciences. We shall point out that there exist everrecurrent ideological controversies which, going beyond sheer methodological objections, have left their mark on the typological approach as it appears in a wide variety of contexts. One of the oldest genealogical branches of the typological tradition is the anatomical-physiological approach that is identified with Hippocrates, the father of medicine: since health is a normal state of affairs, medicine begins where the state of the body deviates from its healthy course. Hippocrates developed a classification consisting of two major types, one characterized by a long and thin body (the phthisic habitus), the other by a short, thick physique (the apoplectic habitus). Recognizing the physical type was of heuristic significance for the physician, since each type (as the name suggests) pointed to a constitutional predisposition to a deviant state of health. By drawing extreme physical types and correlating them with observable behavior (or, rather, with inner constitutional predispositions which, if not guarded against, would become manifest in pathological body states), Hippocrates quite early elaborated the rationale of a typological classification and its major characteristic: an external sign or physical condition pointing to an inner condition. This branch of the tradition, then, was a forerunner of all those constructed on the basis of human constitutional differentiation. Specific classifications have included the differentiation of the human physique into types of temperaments (sanguine, phlegmatic, etc.) related to the basic elements of earth, air, fire, and water, with all this culminating in the notions of the zodiac, which is a complex typology of temperaments based on cosmic forces; racial types; geographical types
(these and racial types being combined loosely, as in the types of Alpine, Nordic, Mediterranean, etc.); blood types; and so forth. These typologies have in common the feature of seeking to determine the propensities for behavior on the basis of physical structure. This constitutional school of psychology has had such adherents in modern times as Cesare Lombroso, Ernst Kretschmer, and, more recently, the American psychologist and medical researcher W. H. Sheldon (1940; 1942). It is worth noting that, since Hippocrates, such a typological approach tends to stress pathological deviations from a golden mean of normality-, certain extreme physical conditions are regularly taken to correlate with types of inner mental conditions, which then become manifest in behavior of an undesirable sort (e.g., criminality, juvenile delinquency). A related historical tradition also going back to classical antiquity is the field of characterology and personality studies. In this context, Plato's Republic contains a systematic typological classification which may well be taken as a model for contemporary research in the field of "personality and social structure." Plato constructed an ideal society, the republic, whose political organization is marked by optimal structural differentiation and functional interdependence of social aggregates, with each social stratum contributing to the welfare of the republic according to its abilities. The type of individual whose personality integration matches this harmonious ideal is the philosopherking. Plato also created other types of societies, and their corresponding types of individuals, along a line of diminishing rationality of social organization and a corresponding decreasing order of happiness (the latter being the criterion to evaluate social being). Thus, Plato emerged with a typology of personality and social structure consisting of five major types, four of which are deviations from an ideal type of society. Not only are all the essential features of the methodology of typological classification contained in this seminal work, but it also provides a theoretical model of social change by specifying conditions under which change from one type of polity to another occurs. This feature of Plato's thought is worth keeping in mind, since it suggests that a typological classification need not be concerned solely with the "static" analysis of social structure, nor need it neglect social processes. Aristotle (who may be called the grandfather of taxonomy) devised, in his theory of social action, a sophisticated typology of social character (see, in particular, Ethics, books 3-5). Different types of motivation are distinguished by using the doc-
TYPOLOGIES trine of the golden mean as a reference point; polar extremes are constructed so that for each basic type of motivation three social character types are isolated. Thus, the giving of wealth characterizes the Liberal Man; polar extremes of this motivation typify the Prodigal Man and the Stingy Man. For another grouping of individuals, it is the pursuit of honor which has motivational primacy; the person who seeks it in just proportion is the Brave Man, and polar deviations on either side characterize, as types, the Rash Man and the Coward. This typology of Aristotle's (which is just one of his many attempts at the systematic classification of phenomena) may be taken as the prototype of all studies of human values that distinguish various types of personalities in terms of their basic motivational dispositions. In modern times, an important philosopher in this tradition is Wilhelm Dilthey, with his investigations of types of basic attitudes toward life (the study of Weltanschauungen}. Dilthey in turn greatly influenced Karl Mannheim, who dealt with fundamental types of political thought and motivation (e.g., "Utopian" and "ideological" attitudes). Mention should also be made of Eduard Spranger's major work (1914), which differentiates six basic types of attitudes or values as characterizing the mental life of individuals. Spranger's research has been followed up by the well-known Allport-Vernon test of personal values, which is an empirical instrument that facilitates the typological study of character. All this thought and research may justly be called Aristotelian. Another early source in the history of typological classification is that of theology. Indeed, typology as a specific discipline first emerged in the theological study of symbols relating the Old Testament to the New Testament. Theologians found in the Old Testament not just historical accounts or religious admonitions but also symbolic prefigurations (or prototypes) of Christian revelation in the New Testament: for example, Jonah spending three days in the whale as a prefiguration of Christ's descent into hell and resurrection on the third day. This theological aspect of typology deserves more than passing mention because, among the classic typological studies in sociology, those having an important religious dimension are perhaps the best known. Thus, if the "ideal type" methodology in sociology received its most sophisticated treatment in the research of Max Weber, it should be remembered that it was above all in the field of religious organizations and religious authority that Weber developed this approach. The sociology of religion can also claim the important
181
typological studies of Ernst Troeltsch, Joachim Wach, and Howard Becker. Moreover, typological classification in sociology has another root in religious studies: the social dualism of Augustine, which made him see all history in terms of two types of social organization— the city of God and the city of man (De civitate dei, books 15-18; see the discussion in Dawson [1930] 1960, pp. 57-61, 66-73). This dualism is the principal intellectual ancestor of so much that is central to religious thought and behavior in western Europe that it is not fanciful to compare St. Augustine's "two cities" with the sacred-secular distinction as developed by such theorists of social organization as Ferdinand Tonnies, Emile Durkheim, Robert Redfield, and Howard Becker. Finally, like Augustine, the sociologists and anthropologists who have made use of this polarity have done it primarily as a heuristic device, as a crucial standpoint from which to interpret historical processes of social change unfolding before the observer. In the natural sciences, the major intellectual influence in the development of typological classification is Georges Cuvier, whose career spanned the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and who made the systematic classification of animals into an accepted scientific discipline. At the same time that Immanuel Kant was trying to rescue knowledge from the skepticism of Hume by introducing the notion of judgments that were both synthetic and a priori, Cuvier sought to rescue zoology from the skepticism of Buffon, who had placed stress on the infinite multiplicity of individual organisms. Cuvier's equivalent of the Kantian synthetic a priori was a concept of classification based on the morphological stability of species (Coleman 1964, p. 74). In Cuvier's system, the prime unit of classification is the type (or species); it is assumed that the organism has a natural "wholeness"—or, in other words, that there is a distinctly functional significance both in the continuing relationship between the parts of an organism and in the persistence of its morphological form. It is no accident, therefore, that Cuvier, one of the founders of comparative anatomy, has also been called "the high priest of typology"; indeed, he may be seen as standing in the line of direct descent from Aristotelian teleology. More germane to our purpose, Cuvier's methodology contains all the major premises and the approach of structural-functional analysis in modern sociological theory. Structural—functional analysis, which has been purged of its teleological aspect in the works of Talcott Parsons, Robert K. Merton, Kingsley Davis, and others (while the teleological element was very
182
TYPOLOGIES
much present in its formulation by Brom'slaw Malinowski and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown), has its source in biological explanation; and this in turn can be traced back to Cuvier's typological approach in comparative anatomy. In all these various traditions (philosophical, biological, theological) typologies have been subjected to important recurrent controversies of an ideological nature which go beyond the methodological criticisms of typological classification noted in the previous section. In philosophy, typological classification and its significance are involved in one of the oldest of all philosophical controversies: nominalism versus realism. The question as to whether essences, "forms," or ideas exist ontologically, as the Platonic realist tradition holds, or whether the form is no more than an abstraction given in nomenclature, as the nominalist position would argue, has embroiled the notion of type in the same dispute. Are types just constructs, or are they necessarily dictated to observation by a natural arrangement of phenomena into organic wholes? In theology, the controversy involving typology has been no less acute. One focus here has involved the question of treating objects taken from one context as prefigurative symbols heralding later events—-that is, the question of whether there is an organic relation between the Old Testament and the New Testament (as the typologist school held) or whether they are essentially discrete. Another theological controversy was that in Byzantium between the iconoclasts and iconodules: here the problem was essentially whether an image (icon) of Christ had efficacious power deriving from its symbolic referent, and hence merited being worshiped, or whether it was just a concrete representation not related to anything covertly existent. This type of controversy concerning the nature of ultimate reality may seem both abstruse and idly speculative; however, typologies have often been involved in ideological controversies which are only lower-level instances of broad metaphysical problems, and these controversies cannot be ignored by social scientists. At heart, the upholding of typologies and a typological classification is a conservative position, while an antitypological perspective is associated with a liberal ideology (Marxist thought is no exception to this since, although seemingly in favor of change, it has shown itself conservative in maintaining, for instance, that bourgeois and proletarian are fixed types). This may seem a rather unexpected statement; but when controversies involving typologies in various disciplines and at
various times are examined, the conclusion is inescapable. The ideological criticism leveled at typologies based upon morphological structures is fundamentally that they are "undemocratic," inasmuch as they assign individuals to fixed groups; moreover, those who have been the most ardent proponents of typological classifications have also had a perspective of the world that stresses traditional religion, the "fixity" of the creation, and the hierarchical arrangement of nature into welldefined strata. In fact, almost regardless of the discipline, typological classifications tend to have an evaluational component which goes against the grain of an individualistic-egalitarian outlook. Thus, the famous classification of Linnaeus (Linne 1758) not only has a hierarchical arrangement of the plant and animal kingdoms, but within the latter the species of mankind are evaluated into higher and lower positions. The linguistic typology of Friedrich von Schlegel (1808) evaluated inflectional languages (Indo-European) as having a certain vitality not shared by affix languages; and even such a recent study as that by T. W. Adorno and others, The Authoritarian Personality (1950), which focuses on two distinct personality types, carries an evaluational bias in favor of the one "good" type. Hence, the use of typologies has not been "affectively neutral"; rather, it has been attended by an unwitting moral evaluation of hierarchically drawn types—even if the types were originally taken to be on the same plane. It may be pointed out that, in our own times, typological methods and approaches are in disrepute. The causes of this can be traced to the individualistic and egalitarian ideals of the French Revolution, on the one hand, and the impact of evolutionary doctrine, on the other. The ideology of the revolution constituted an attack against all static and hierarchical categorizations of human beings, because it attacked the idea of allotting any individual to a predetermined social status. The theory of evolution, with its stress on the adaptation of an animal population over time through variation, is opposed to the Linnaean doctrine of the eternal fixity of species (species tot sunt, quot formae ab initio creatae sunt). In any case, there is a deep cleavage between the traditional typological and the modern antitypological outlooks. The "new" perspective on typologies and taxonomy (Simpson 1961) is in terms of a nominalist position; types are used for nomenclature only. Even so, the classification of specimens in a field seemingly so remote from current events as paleontology (Washburn 1963) is still very much affected by ideological controversies.
TYPOLOGIES In relation to its general task of taxonomy, the traditional typological outlook was never able to eliminate the problem of how to account for observable species variations and gradations. The evolutionary taxonomist of today is faced with the converse problem: how to account for the continuity and uniformity that can be observed in all species. Both approaches have their dangers; for instance, if the typologist is so concerned with the central tendency of a population that he may disregard dispersion (in space and time), so also may the antitypologist run the risk of being so concerned with individual deviations that he may lose sight of the central tendency that gives the group its mean or aggregate characteristic. As limiting cases, the pure case for typology would be established if, for given behavioral items, human groups had for each group one and only one score or response; the strict case against typologies would require, correspondingly, that there be as many different responses as there are individuals measured. It should be clear to all but extreme dogmatists that the question of whether types are "real" is a metaphysical one and should be left to philosophers. What may be asserted here is that for purposes of scientific research, types treated as central tendencies are no less necessary than variations from the type. Sophisticated users of typologies have fully realized that quantitative differences between individuals assigned to the same category may be, for another part of the investigation, as significant as qualitative differences between the categories themselves. In other words, differences in degree are as essential to a good typology as differences in kind. If this caveat is observed, and if one also remembers that, in our everyday life, we experience nature as a continuum (Natura non facit saltus}, the social scientist may put typological classification to fruitful use and bypass the ideological issues. Some modern contributions Although typological classification has been the source of much controversy, the development of the social sciences during this century has involved typological research to a considerable extent. For instance, the "ideal type" is of pivotal importance in Max Weber's theoretical and comparative analyses of social structures and social change. The "theory of action" developed by Talcott Parsons and associates not only owes much to Weber for its inspiration, but may be seen, in terms of the present context, as an elaborate typological classification of interrelated systems of action. Georg Simmel, a contemporary of Weber's in Germany
183
(a country which, for reasons still unclear to this writer, has been the radiating center for typological investigations of all sorts ), independently developed an approach to sociological theory that is fundamentally morphological and typological. Unlike Weber, his interests in social types and forms of interaction led him to a mainly descriptive rather than an interpretive use of types. Simmel's studies of types greatly influenced Robert E. Park and such associates of his in the Chicago school as Louis Wirth. A recent contribution to this tradition is Orrin E. Klapp's study (1962) of American national character as revealed by the high or low esteem in which Various social types are held. At the level of general sociological theory, the use of typology in the Work of Georges Gurvitch is as important as it is in the work of Parsons. Gurvitch stated ([1950] 1963, p. 478) that the method of sociology is typological, and he has given much attention to the typology of social structures and social groupings, particularly to types of global societies (1958, pp. 216^233). Since Weber's death, the use of his ideal type analysis has been extended, notably by Howard Becker and John C. McKinney (1966) in their elaboration of the methodology of "constructive typology." At a different level, Paul F. Lazarsfeld (1937) developed the logic of "qualitative analysis," which is related to the "latent structure" analysis that he later developed for use in the measurement of attitudes. It should be noted that this approach explicitly rests on the assumption of stable types of attitudes; it therefore constitutes a refined, formalized, and quantifiable elaboration of typological procedures. Studies of attitudes in social psychology by means of scales and other measurements are in spirit typological, since they presuppose the existence of underlying attitude types. Indeed, it may be suggested that Guttman scales conform to Simpson's description (1945, p. 3) of "archetypal" classifications found in the Linnaean system [see SCALING]. German-speaking scholars have been among the most important figures in the development of social psychology. Here, again, the influence of Dilthey has been immense. In the field of personality studies, the outstanding example of the typological approach is undoubtedly Jung's Psychological Types (1921), which owes part of its inspiration to Dilthey. The cornerstone of Jung's "analytic psychology" is the comprehensive relation of four basic types of activity (thinking, feeling, sensation, intuition) to the libidinal flow of intentionality (subject versus object orientation, or introversionextraversion). At the level of personality, this
184
TYPOLOGIES
conjunction yields two major types, each having four distinct varieties. In extending his studies historically and crossculturally, Jung further developed the notion of archetypes as primitive molds or images of the psyche that structure our psychological apprehension of the world. Although the heat of controversy involving this concept still obscures its heuristic merit, archetypes may be thought of as having the function, at the psychic level, that the Kantian categories fulfill at the conscious level. Most clinical psychology is heavily indebted to the notion of "personality type"; indeed, clinical studies implicitly look for deviations from an imagined "normal" person. Thus the delineation of clinical syndromes is, in effect, a constructive typology at the personality level, though wide variations exist between researchers as to what sorts of traits are seen as clustering. In fact, many of the problems of therapy stem from the difficulty of applying the existing diagnostic categories to cases that were never envisaged when these categories were first devised. Jung's treatment of personality types owes some of its inspiration to Nietzsche, who formulated, as two dialectically related types of cultural personality, the affective Dionysian and the rational Apollonian. This conceptual dichotomy has been almost as influential in the intellectual history of the social sciences as Tonnies' division of types of social structure into Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. Nietzsche's influence has loomed particularly large in the attempt to characterize types of sociocultural systems which has been one focus of attention in cultural anthropology. The distinction between Apollonian and Dionysian is reflected in Oswald Spengler's notions of Classical and Faustian civilizations; it also reappears in Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture (1934). In this context might be mentioned the research of Pitirim Sorokin into fundamental types of sociocultural systems, and the more recent work of Florence Kluckhohn. Ruth Benedict's work stimulated new research in national character, a field that presupposes the existence of natural "types" of personality. The most widely read of recent studies in this genre is probably The Lonely Crowd (1950), by David Riesman and his associates. The future of typological research In an essay first published in 1903, Emile Durkheim, in collaboration with Marcel Mauss, called for the development of a branch of sociology, to be known as "social morphology," whose primary task would be to develop the systematic classification of
social types or species in relation to social structure. Recent events have underscored the need for a precise typology of societies so as to avoid an oversimplified view of social and economic change. Much of the literature on economic development has suffered from problems involved in the simplistic dichotomy of "developed" and "underdeveloped" countries. If heed were paid to Durkheim, more attention would be placed on codifying the empirical materials by means of an elaborate and rigorous typology of societies. But there is another vast area involving typologies which is just now beginning to be investigated, although it was outlined long ago by Durkheim and Mauss. Its general content can be outlined as follows. If, in spite of acute controversies and criticisms, the construction of types (as we have seen) remains an ever-present feature of empirical investigations, it may well be that typologizing, in the sense of structuring the world or perceiving it by means of categorial types, is a basic orientation of human agents to their situation. Further, it can be seen as a fundamental perceptual activity which may well be subject to sociocultural conditioning in the socialization process. The grouping and classification of objects into distinct types is, in this sense, a basic human activity presupposed in more complex behavior patterns. Durkheim and Mauss (1903) insisted that types are not just logical categories, but also affective collective symbols of classification. Implicit in their discussion is the notion that sociology and social anthropology should also concern themselves with the "natural typologies" found in various societies; that is, the symbolic classification of entities into types should be treated as primary ethnological data. They call attention to the theoretical significance of "folk classifications"—which might be termed "existential typologies," since they reflect conditions of existence of human subjects themselves. In recent years, considerable attention has been given to the methodology of constructed typologies; but what has been overlooked, for the most part, is that these may be thought of as special instances of human typologizing. However, the significance of classifications, and the symbolic aspects of groupings and categories, have aroused fresh interest in modern structural anthropology, notably in the writings of E. R. Leach and Rodney Needham in England, Thomas Beidelman in the United States, and, perhaps best known, Claude LeviStrauss in France (1962; 1964). These authors have concentrated their attention on the cognitive structures implicit in certain "folk classifications"
TYPOLOGIES of such things as plants, animals, colors, and kinship terminology. Finally, we may note an important convergence between sociology and anthropology in this context. The phenomenological approach in sociology, which owes much of its inspiration to both Max Weber and Edmund Husserl, has placed great emphasis upon the everyday typifications which structure the life-world (Lebenswelt) of actors. Attention to such typologizing of social reality as a primary datum of sociological analysis has been given in the writings of Alfred Schutz (1962) and his followers, such as Maurice Natanson and Harold Garfmkel. It is an extension of this path of research which seems particularly promising, since a phenomenology of typologies opens up a host of meaningful interdisciplinary research problems. What cultural variations are significant in differentiating folk typologies? What are the major dimensions of these existential typologies? How do individual actors and collectivities integrate multiple typologies? Under what conditions do actors "test" their typologies and adopt new ones? Which typological classifications are more impervious to social change? What sort of correspondence is there between scientific or constructive typologies and existential ones? These and many related questions are suggestive of the important research problems which typological classification still offers to sociology, psychology, and anthropology, both separately and in collaboration. EDWARD A. TIRYAKIAN [Directly related are the entries HISTORY, article on THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY; KNOWLEDGE, SOCIOLOGY OF; LINGUISTICS; MULTIVARIATE ANALYSIS, article On CLASSIFICATION AND DISCRIMINATION; SOCIOLOGY, article on THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIOLOGICAL THOUGHT. Other relevant material may be found in CONTENT ANALYSIS; PHENOMENOLOGY; SOCIAL STRUCTURE; and in the biographies of ARISTOTLE; AUGUSTINE; BECKER; BENEDICT; DILTHEY; DURKHEIM; JUNG; KANT; KRETSCHMER; LOMBROSO; MALINOWSKI; MANNHEIM; MAUSS; PARK; PLATO; RADCLIFFEBROWN; REDFIELD; SCHUTZ; SIMMEL; SOROKIN; SPENCER; SPENGLER; TONNIES; TROELTSCH; WEBER, MAX; WIRTH.] BIBLIOGRAPHY ADORNO, THEODOR W. et al. 1950 The Authoritarian Personality. The American Jewish Committee, Social Studies Series, No. 3. New York: Harper. -» See especially Chapter 19. BARTON, ALLEN H.; and LAZARSFELD, PAUL F. (1955) 1961 Some Functions of Qualitative Analysis in Social Research. Pages 95-122 in Seymour M. Lipset and Neil J. Smelser (editors), Sociology: The Progress of a Decade. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. BECKER, HOWARD 1950 Through Values to Social Interpretation: Essays on Social Contexts, Actions, Types
785
and Prospects. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press. -> See especially Chapters 2 and 5. BENEDICT, RUTH (1934) 1959 Patterns of Culture. 2d ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. -» A paperback edition was published in 1961. BOER, JULIUS DE (1939) 1963 A System of Characterology: Polar Synergy of Feeling, Willing, and Thinking as the Dynamic Principle for the Classification of Characters. Assen (Netherlands): Van Gorcum. -» First published as Polaire affectieve functies. BONNER, HUBERT 1961 Psychology of Personality. New York: Ronald Press. --> See especially Chapter 3. COLEMAN, WILLIAM 1964 Georges Cuvier, Zoologist. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. DARWIN, CHARLES (1859) 1964 On the Origin of Species. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. DAWSON, CHRISTOPHER (1930) 1960 St. Augustine and His Age. Pages 15-77 in Saint Augustine, by Martin C. D'Arcy et al. New York: Meridian. DURKHEIM, EMILE; and MAUSS, MARCEL (1903) 1963 Primitive Classification. Translated and edited by Rodney Needham. Univ. of Chicago Press. -» First published as "De quelques formes primitives de classification" in Annee sociologique. FREUD, SIGMUND (1931) 1932 Libidinal Types. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 1:3-6. -» First published in German. GREENBERG, JOSEPH H. 1960 A Quantitative Approach to the Morphological Typology of Language. International Journal of American Linguistics 26:178-194. GURVITCH, GEORGES (1950) 1963 La vocation actuelle de la sociologie. Volume 2: Antecedents et perspectives. 3d ed. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. GURVITCH, GEORGES 1958 Traite de sociologie. Volume 1: Vers la sociologie differentielle. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. HEMPEL, CARL G. (1952) 1963 Typological Methods in the Social Sciences. Pages 210-230 in Maurice A. Natanson (editor), Philosophy of the Social Sciences. New York: Random House. JUNG, CARL G. (1921) 1959 Psychological Types: Or the Psychology of Individuation. London: Routledge. -» First published in German. JUNG, CARL G. Collected Works. Volume 9, part 1: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Edited by Herbert Read et al. New York: Pantheon, 1959.—> First published in German. KLAPP, ORRIN E. 1962 Heroes, Villains, and Fools: The Changing American Character. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. LAZARSFELD, PAUL F. 1937 Some Remarks on the Typological Procedures in Social Research. Studies in Philosophy; Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung 6:119-139. LEVI-STRAUSS, CLAUDE (1962) 1966 The Savage Mind. Univ. of Chicago Press. -> First published in French. LEVI-STRAUSS, CLAUDE 1964 Le cru et le cuit. Paris: Plon. LINNE, CARL VON (1758) 1956 Systema naturae. 10th ed. London: British Museum. MCKINNEY, JOHN C. 1954 Constructive Typology and Social Research. Pages 139-198 in John T. Doby (editor), An Introduction to Social Research. Harrisburg, Pa.: Stackpole. MCKINNEY, JOHN C. 1957 The Polar Variables of Type Construction. Social Forces 35:300-306. McKiNNEY, JOHN C. 1966 Constructive Typology and Social Theory. New York: Appleton.
186
TYPOLOGIES
MAYR, ERNST; LINSLEY, E. G.; and USINGER, R. L. 1953 Methods and Principles of Systematic Zoology. New York: McGraw-Hill. RIESMAN, DAVID 1950 The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. SCHLEGEL, FRIEDRICH VON 1808 Uber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier. Heidelberg (Germany): Mohr & Simmer. SCHUTZ, ALFRED Collected Papers. Volume 1: The Problem of Social Reality. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1962. SHELDON, W. H. 1940 The Varieties of Human Physique: An Introduction to Constitutional Psychology. New York: Harper. SHELDON, W. H. 1942 The Varieties of Temperament: A Psychology of Constitutional Differences. New York: Harper. SIMPSON, GEORGE G. 1945 The Principles of Classification and a Classification of Mammals. Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, Vol. 85. New York: The Museum.
SIMPSON, GEORGE G. 1961 Principles of Animal Taxonomy. Columbia Biological Series, No. 20. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. SPRANGER, EDUARD (1914) 1928 Types of Men: The Psychology and Ethics of Personality. 5th ed. Halle (Germany): Niemeyer. -» First published as Lebensformen: Geisteswissenschaftliche Psychologic und Ethik der Personlichkeit. STEIN, MORRIS I. 1963 Explorations in Typology. Pages 280-303 in Robert W. White (editor), The Study of Lives: Essays on Personality in Honor of Henry A. Murray. New York: Atherton. STEINMETZ, S. RUDOLF 1898-1899 Classification des types sociaux et catalogue des peuples. Annee sociologique 3:43-147. WASHBURN, S. L. (editor) 1963 Classification and Human Evolution. Chicago: Aldine. WEBER, MAX (1904-1917) 1949 Max Weber on the Methodology of the Social Sciences. Translated and edited by Edward Shils and Henry A. Finch. Glencoe7 111.: Free Press. -> First published in Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik and in Logos.
UL'IANOV, VLADIMIR IL'ICH See LENIN. UNCONSCIOUS PERCEPTION See under PERCEPTION. UNCONVENTIONAL WARFARE See INTERNAL WARFARE. UNDERDEVELOPMENT, ECONOMIC See ECONOMIC GROWTH; MODERNIZATION; STAGNATION; TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE. UNDEREMPLOYMENT See EMPLOYMENT AND UNEMPLOYMENT; see also AGRICULTURE, article on DEVELOPING COUNTRIES. UNEMPLOYMENT See EMPLOYMENT AND UNEMPLOYMENT; UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE.
UNEMPLOYMENT
INSURANCE
Unemployment insurance is a program of social insurance designed to compensate workers for part of the wage loss caused by involuntary joblessness. Weekly benefits are paid to eligible workers as a matter of right, according to benefit schedules or formulas stipulated in the law. Benefit eligibility and amounts are related to previous contributions by or on behalf of the worker. In addition to the primary purpose of providing employees with a measure of economic security through wage-loss compensation, unemployment
insurance helps to cushion economic slumps by supplying consumer purchasing power. It can therefore serve as an important "automatic economic stabilizer." Also, unemployment insurance may preserve work skills and training by reducing pressures on the unemployed to accept lower-level jobs, and it may provide additional incentive, through differentiated employer taxes, for managements to regularize their employment. Methods. Most national systems of unemployment insurance are compulsory, in the sense that coverage is required by law and the taxing power is used for financing benefits. In the Scandinavian countries the program consists of funds voluntarily organized and administered by trade unions and subsidized by the state from tax monies. The United States has a federal-state program. Essentially the federal government, under the Social Security Act of 1935, forced the states to enact programs of unemployment insurance by levying an unemployment tax on employers and offering to pay the full cost of administration of a state program approved under the terms of the federal act. The federal unemployment tax on employers' payrolls is subject to 90 per cent offset (1) for employer payments of state payroll taxes for unemployment benefits or (2) for reductions in or exemptions from such a state tax under a program of experience rating. Thus, each state is free to determine its own benefit level and duration and its own tax rates under company-by-company experience rating based on benefits or layoffs charged to individual employers; benefit provisions and tax rates differ widely among the states. In addition to the federal-state program, there is a separate national unemployment insurance system for railroad employees. That system is
187
188
UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE
financed by a uniform federal tax on all the carriers and has a single, nationwide benefit schedule. Under the state laws, unemployment benefits are related to previous earnings. An individual's eligibility for benefits will depend on his total earnings or weeks of work in a base year. The amount of his weekly benefit and, in most states, the number of weeks that he can draw benefits will vary with his base-year earnings or work experience. Relating wages to previous earnings tends to restrict coverage and limits total claims on a state's fund. Historical development. Generally, unemployment has been the last major economic risk of workers to be covered by social insurance. Programs on a national scale began with state subsidies to voluntary schemes in France (in 1905), Norway (in 1906), and Denmark (in 1907). The first national law establishing a compulsory program on a country-wide basis was enacted by Great Britain in 1911. The second was enacted by Italy in 1919. Germany adopted a compulsory program in 1927, Japan in 1947, and Canada in 1955. As previously noted, the federal-state system in the United States started with passage of the Social Security Act in 1935, and by mid-1937 all states had enacted unemployment insurance laws complying with the provisions of the federal act. Issues. Disagreement concerning objectives, mechanisms, and effects helps to explain the delayed development of unemployment insurance programs. Sharp differences of opinion have arisen on a number of issues. Both individual and total unemployment are unpredictable, yet they are subject to various influences and controls. Government monetary, fiscal, and foreign-trade policies affect the volume of unemployment. It is also claimed that workers and managements are, in some measure, responsible for joblessness. Unemployment benefits may have an impact on wage levels and on worker incentives and mobility. Tests of availability for work and of willingness to accept a suitable job present practical difficulties. For such reasons, unemployment has not seemed to be a risk suitable for private underwriting, and no insurance company has sought such business. The chief controversies in unemployment insurance have centered around five issues: (1) How much should the insurance purpose of wage-loss compensation be modified by considerations of worker needs and incentives? (2) What are "adequate" benefits? (3) How should the program be financed, and to what extent should a concept of blame or responsibility influence the financial arrangements? (4) What restrictions on worker cov-
erage, benefit eligibility, and benefit disqualification are necessary in order to maintain the integrity of the program? (5) Are separate state and industry programs preferable to a single, national program? The different aspects of unemployment insurance (coverage, benefit level and duration, eligibility, disqualifications, financing, and level of policy determination) are interrelated parts of a coordinated scheme. Flat benefits go with flat contributions; liberal benefits stimulate restricted eligibility and severe disqualifications. Views on any aspect of the program are affected by one's conception of the purposes of unemployment insurance and one's philosophy of economics and of government. Therefore, in discussing the five policy issues, it is necessary to bear in mind the interconnections between the parts and their relation to a general economic philosophy. Insurance versus need. Whether the program should be strictly one of compensation for wage loss from short-term joblessness or should make allowance for need factors (family size, cost of living, difficulty of re-employment, training needs, etc.) is a basic philosophical issue in unemployment insurance. Generally, under the state laws, weekly benefit amounts vary directly with the individual's previous earnings. Organized labor in the United States has strongly supported benefit levels varying with regular wage differentials and benefit ceilings sufficiently high so that only a minor fraction of the beneficiaries would have a flat benefit rate at the ceiling level. However, there has been strong sentiment in some unions for dependents' allowances, which would mean that workers with the same wage record would receive different benefits, depending on family size. With respect to benefit duration, important elements in organized labor have tended to stress needs rather than earnings. They have favored uniform duration regardless of the individual's total previous earnings or length of employment and have supported ad hoc 50 per cent extensions of duration in periods of heavy long-term unemployment. Generally, business management in the United States has stressed maintenance of the insurance principle and avoidance of any mixing of unemployment insurance and unemployment relief based on individual and family need. However, some elements in management have favored a minimum program with relatively low benefit ceilings, in order to limit costs and to restrict the role of unemployment insurance to a subsistence minimum. The result would be flat or uniform benefits for most recipients, not benefits compensating in pro-
UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE portion to wage loss. Also, there has been some management sentiment for relating benefits to the individual's net (after taxes and other deductions) pay rather than his gross earnings. Modification of the insurance principle by considerations of beneficiaries' needs may take other forms. Some state laws provide continued and additional duration of benefits for jobless workers who are participating in an approved training program, during which they may not be available for work and, therefore, are not involuntarily unemployed. At times some sentiment has existed to make the performance of public work a condition for continued receipt of unemployment benefits—at least for some workers under extended benefit programs, such as those in the United States in 1958-1959 and 1961-1962. This would involve a mixture of unemployment insurance and work relief. Adequacy of benefits. No consensus exists with respect to the criteria for adequacy of benefit levels or duration. One suggested test is that benefits should be sufficiently large to enable workers to meet all nondeferrable expenses for necessities (variously defined) throughout the period of their unemployment. Despite special studies in six states, this test has proved difficult to quantify. A frequently mentioned standard for weekly benefits is 50 per cent of gross weekly pay. Because of the restrictive effects of low benefit ceilings, the average rate of compensation in the United States has been around 40 per cent. Incomplete coverage, waiting periods, benefit disqualifications, nonfiling by eligibles, and exhaustion of benefit rights have resulted in a percentage of wage-loss replacement for total unemployment of about 20 per cent for the country as a whole. For purposes of economic stabilization the percentage should be considerably larger. This is especially true in view of the fact that, by and large, recession unemployment is compensated at no higher rate than nonrecession joblessness. Supplemental unemployment benefits negotiated under collective bargaining in such high-wage industries as auto, steel, and rubber have established a standard of 65 per cent of net pay, which averages perhaps 55 per cent of gross pay. Experience indicates that for heads of households benefits would need to be much closer to 100 per cent of net pay in order to have significant adverse effects on incentives to work. The duration of benefits raises the question of the types of unemployment that the insurance program is designed to meet. Although complete agreement is lacking, most students of the subject would limit benefits for one period of unemployment to
18 9
between 26 and 39 weeks. This is not only for cost reasons but also because of the need for re-examination of the recipient's case and his possible readjustment in order to avoid the debilitating effects of extended benefits as a matter of right. Of course, pressures build up for special extension of benefits in periods of heavy unemployment, in the absence of a satisfactory program of unemployment relief and proper arrangements for worker retraining and relocation. In the United States, benefit duration under the state laws has been lengthening to an average of about 25 weeks as long-term unemployment has become more serious. In some negotiated plans for supplemental unemployment benefits, benefit duration is 52 weeks, as it is under the national program in Canada. Financing. In almost all countries, unemployment insurance is financed by equal employer and employee contributions, with either a contribution by the state or some state subvention for administrative costs. In the United States, however, in all except three states, taxes levied on the employer's payroll meet the full cost of benefits and administration. Vague notions about the causes of unemployment, of possible preventive action by individual employers, and of allocation of the benefit costs according to responsibility lie behind sole reliance on employer taxes under experience rating in the United States. In addition, complete reliance on employer contributions permits employees to escape any personal income tax on income used for social insurance contributions. Experience rating of individual employers for tax purposes gives each employer a direct interest in the denial of benefits to his former employees because in most states he can thereby make a tax saving. Such employer interest, it is claimed, helps to prevent abuse. Under experience rating some employers are completely exempt from the state tax in one-fourth of the states because of their favorable employment or benefit records, and in some twenty other states many firms are taxed at a rate 10 to 30 times that applied to employers on the most favorable rate. Since many competing employers are likely to be at both the minimum rate and the maximum rate, the bulk of the incidence of the state taxes appears to rest on the employer. In most states, experience rating results in the rising or falling of tax rates as total benefits increase or decline, with a year's lag. That tends to accentuate the business cycle. In addition, the most favorable tax rate can be acquired by an employer who contracts his employment through normal
1 90
UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE
attrition, whereas with a rapidly expanding labor force and high unemployment levels, it would seem desirable to reward expansion in employment and especially in the hiring of disadvantaged workers. Coverage, eligibility, disqualifications. Unemployment insurance is faced with several difficult problems of administration and definition. In addition to their technical aspects, such problems involve questions of social insurance philosophy. A strict insurance viewpoint may result in more restricted coverage and tighter eligibility requirements than in stress on need for benefit protection. Particularly where the tax is levied completely on the employer, small businesses with two or three employees and nonprofit institutions of all sorts may resist inclusion in coverage. In addition, administrative difficulties may preclude inclusion of migratory farm workers and other casual labor. Nevertheless, coverage has tended to expand gradually. Benefit eligibility involves problems of defining "regular" attachment to the labor market and "involuntary unemployment." There is, for instance, a question whether short-season workers should be eligible for benefits when they are jobless during the off-season. Under state laws, eligibility is defined in terms of qualifying wages or weeks of employment; either way, it usually means that it takes 14 to 20 weeks of covered employment to qualify. In some states, the receipt of other employee benefits (i.e., a pension, dismissal compensation, or workmen's compensation) may render a worker ineligible or reduce his unemployment benefit accordingly. In addition, in order to draw benefits a worker must be registered at a public employment office and be available for work. Although the states have not increased their wage qualifications as rapidly as earnings have risen, benefit disqualifications have been tightened considerably. Levy of the full tax on the employer and the allocation of benefits to particular employers under experience rating have been largely responsible for that development. An unemployed worker who is discharged for misconduct, or who (in about half the states) voluntarily quits, even for good personal or economic reasons, or who refuses a job offer considered suitable will have his benefits postponed, reduced, or canceled. The nature of the penalty and the restriction of good cause for leaving to employer responsibility have reduced benefit eligibility. Decentralized versus national systems. Most countries have a single, national system with nationwide pooling of reserves. In Scandinavia, the
Netherlands, and Switzerland there are separate regional, industrial, or occupational funds. In the United States the existence of separate state systems encourages interstate competition for industry through low benefits, severe disqualifications, and the resulting low tax rates. Some states offer a worker with a particular wage record twice as much in total benefits as other states do. In addition, the incidence of unemployment by states is quite uneven, with the low-benefit states also being the low-unemployment states. The arguments for separate state unemployment programs are in terms of the maintenance of state functions under a federal system of government, the advantages of state experimentation, and the desirability of decentralization and adaptation to local or regional conditions. Fear exists that centralization of policy determination may lead to inflexible uniformity and national use of unemployment insurance for political purposes. Clearly, there is need for thorough analyses of experience in various countries to determine the validity of different assumptions and reasoning about unemployment insurance. Resources devoted to independent research on the subject are most meager compared with total expenditures. In view of marked differences in financial burdens and the precarious position some state funds have been in, a mechanism for broader sharing of the risk seems highly desirable in the United States. If unemployment insurance is to play an important role as an automatic stabilizer, more stress must be placed on national economic interests in the program. That may mean some type of federal standards for benefit levels and some national sharing of the extraordinary costs of recession unemployment in particular states. RICHARD A. LESTER BIBLIOGRAPHY
Current data and reports on unemployment insurance may be found in the following periodical publications: U.S. Bureau of Employment Security, Comparison of State Unemployment Insurance Laws; Unemployment Insurance Review; U.S. Unemployment Insurance Service, Unemployment Insurance Statistics. BECKER, JOSEPH M. 1953 The Problem of Abuse in Unemployment Benefits: A Study in Limits. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. BECKER, JOSEPH M. (editor) 1965 In Aid of the Unemployed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. -> See especially pages 63-78, "Unemployment Insurance: Risks Covered and Their Financing," by Merrill G. Murray; pages 79-111, "The Adequacy of Benefits in Unemployment Insurance," by Joseph M. Becker; pages
UNIVERSITIES 112-136, "Supplementary Unemployment Benefits," by Joseph M. Becker and V. K. Boman. BURNS, EVELINE M. 1956 Social Security and Public Policy. New York: McGraw-Hill. HABER, WILLIAM; and MURRAY, MERRILL G. 1966 Unemployment Insurance in the American Economy: An Historical Review and Analysis. Homewood, 111.: Irwin. LESTER, RICHARD A. 1960 The Economic Significance of Unemployment Compensation, 1948-1959. Review of Economics and Statistics 42:349-372. PRINCETON UNIVERSITY, INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS SECTION 1962 The Economics of Unemployment Compensation, by Richard A. Lester. Research Reports, Series No. 101. Princeton, N.J.: The University, Industrial Relations Section. Unemployment Insurance Review. -»• Published since 1964. U.S. BUREAU OF EMPLOYMENT SECURITY Comparison of State Unemployment Insurance Laws. -» Published since 1948. U.S. SOCIAL SECURITY ADMINISTRATION, OFFICE OF PROGRAM RESEARCH 1967 Social Security Programs Throughout the World. Washington: Government Printing Office. U.S. UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE SERVICE Unemployment Insurance Statistics. -> Published since 1964. WERMEL, MICHAEL T.; and BEIDEMAN, GERALDINE M. 1957 Supplemental Unemployment Benefit Plans: Their Economic and Industrial Relations Implications. California Institute of Technology, Benefits and Insurance Research Center, Publication No. 4. Pasadena, Calif.: The Institute, Industrial Relations Section.
UNIONS See LABOR UNIONS; for related material, see INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS, article on THE SOCIOLOGY OF WORK; LABOR RELATIONS. UNITED NATIONS See INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATION. UNIVERSITIES Universities are organizations engaged in the advancement of knowledge; they teach, train, and examine students in a variety of scholarly, scientific, and professional fields. Intellectual pursuits in universities define the highest prevailing levels of competence in these fields. The universities confer degrees and provide opportunities both for members of their teaching staffs and for some of their students to do original research. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, much diversification has taken place in the disciplines taught and the research conducted in universities. However, there is variation from country to country in the subjects included in the university curriculum; only the humanities and the natural sciences constitute an important part of the curriculum of universities in all countries. The
191
functions performed by the universities in a particular country are related to their position in the total educational system of that country: the functions of these educational systems as wholes are uniform, and universities have to be treated as parts of a more comprehensive system. Because of their high level of competence, the professional staffs of universities have generally been able to exercise great freedom both in carrying out their scholarly and teaching functions, in recruiting new staff members according to professional standards, and in controlling other university policies. The key prerequisite for this independence is functional specificity; such guildlike traditions in universities as collegiate self-government and the election of deans and rectors do not exist uniformly in all universities and are not as important in safeguarding academic freedom. The medieval European university The European university as a distinct type emerged in the twelfth century. Groups of students and masters from all parts of the Christian world gathered in certain cities and organized themselves into corporations (hence the name universitas, meaning a community or corporation of any kind). Of the first two universities, which served as models for the rest, Bologna was mainly a corporation of students (or rather a federation of student corporations), and Paris was principally a corporation of masters. Corporate privileges included jurisdiction in civil and, in certain cases, criminal matters, the granting of degrees, and, in principle, the right to teach in all universities (licentia ubique docendi}. The most important safeguard of university integrity was the right to strike or to leave town in protest against some insult to the university. The principal universities were legally recognized as corporations by the pope, and their members were either clerics or were regarded as clerics even when they had not taken orders. The first universities were supervised by the local bishop or by one of his high officials—the chancellor. However, the importance of the chancellor receded quite early, and the elected head of the corporation—the rector—became the principal figure of the university. Sometimes, as at Oxford, the chancellor became an elected official of the corporation. At Bologna, a relatively secular university specializing in law, the chancellorship was mainly an honorific post. The universities thus became to a considerable degree independent of the local church. The protection of the papacy was, however, often sought by the universities when they came into
192
UNIVERSITIES
conflict with local bishops and townspeople, and since the Roman Catholic church considered itself responsible for education, this protection was granted readily. Furthermore, since the universities were international institutions in close contact with each other, and since their scholars and masters wandered from university to university, they served a papal cause: the unification of the Christian world. To the members of the universities this close tie to the papacy was acceptable not only because of the protection it provided but also because it accorded with their belief—at least in the twelfth century—in the essential unity of all knowledge and in faith as the highest order of knowledge. In spite of sporadic clashes, the relationship of the universities to the church and in particular to the papacy was based on mutual consent and common interests. The ties with the church created no feeling of constraint; the universities were able to accommodate all the important intellectual currents of the time, and, until the fifteenth century, any limitations on their secular character were selfimposed, arising from the beliefs to which they subscribed. The most characteristic aspect of the teaching at medieval universities was the method of study known as scholasticism. This method was, on the one hand, based on authority: the acceptance of the Christian faith, of the Holy Scriptures, and of the works of certain classical authors; on the other hand, it implied an absolute belief in the power of reason, which, if correctly applied, had to lead to the discovery of all truth. Textual exegesis was thus used as a way of asking "questions" about all kinds of problems, which then gave rise to disputations conducted according to accepted laws of logic and, finally, to original solutions (determination. Although much of this abstract speculation now seems futile, it was carried on in an environment that facilitated the emergence of professional intellectual activity and eventually a series of intellectual revolutions. Scholars discussed the difference between religiously revealed truth and logically discovered truth; they applied dialectical methods to the interpretation of Aristotelian texts and to observed natural phenomena. This led to the emergence of secular thought and to the formulation of physical theories that were important for the genesis of modern natural science. The medieval university was the organizational form embodying the public recognition of the corporate autonomy of specialized intellectuals who performed important social functions. These intellectuals were mainly theologians, lawyers, and physicians. As a stable social structure with sources
of income, buildings, permanent personnel, and legal regulations, the university was able to foster the continuity of the intellectual traditions and the creative intellectual efforts of the age. It also provided a setting for the formation of informal groups; as a permanent enterprise, it made risky or ephemeral ventures possible (an example of a risky venture being the study of natural science). Differentiation of the academic system During the period from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century, universities, like other successful corporations, became part of the system of estates. Professors claimed hereditary privileges for their posts, using their positions like patrimonies and gaining income from fees, bribes, and even moneylending. Some of them became very rich, and in the carefully graded social hierarchy of the time their status tended to be equated with that of knights. A development that particularly affected the universities of Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge was the rise of colleges. These were originally charitable foundations serving as hostels for needy scholars, but they soon came to be used for academic lectures. (In this way, for example, the Paris faculty of theology and, later, the university as a whole became identified with the college founded in 1253 by Robert de Sorbon.) In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries colleges grew very rich through real-estate operations; like some of the monasteries, they became seigneuries ruled by small oligarchies, and these oligarchies dominated the whole university. The colleges monopolized the teaching of the liberal arts and became institutions that catered to the sons of the privileged classes rather than to the international community of scholars. While the earliest universities—Bologna, Paris, and Oxford—had been spontaneous gatherings of scholars, from the thirteenth century on universities were deliberately founded to gain the political support of intellectuals, to strengthen Christianity in areas of contact with heretics or Muslims, or to increase local or national prestige. The University of Naples was founded in 1224 by Frederick n as a rival to the influence of the Guelph city of Bologna. The University of Toulouse was founded in 1229 as part of a scheme for recapturing the heretical lands of the Midi for the church. Similar politico-religious considerations led to the establishment of several Spanish universities in the thirteenth century. Before the fourteenth century, the university movement was predominantly international in character; only Oxford was established as a na-
UNIVERSITIES tional university from its very beginning. It was the founding of the University of Prague in 1348—by Pope Clement vi in response to a petition of Charles iv—that marked the beginning of a movement that turned the universities into national institutions. In the course of the next century and a half many universities were established in the German states, in Scotland, Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark, and—after some early faltering—in Poland and Hungary. By the end of the fifteenth century there were 79 universities in Europe. The extent to which these universities could serve as centers for the development of new ideas was limited. Their chief goal was to prepare men for the professions of law, theology, and medicine, and this precluded the possibility of paying serious attention to intellectual ventures in humanism, natural science, vernacular literature, painting, sculpture, architecture, and music. The flexibility of the universities was further limited by their involvement in the system of estates and in religious controversies. As a result, the intellectual ferment that had started in the universities and had been centered in them until the fifteenth century began to manifest itself both in new types of teaching institutions and in organizations that were primarily engaged in research. The new teaching institutions were colleges, Gymnasiums, and academies (to be distinguished from learned societies, which were also called academies). They provided a more practical education than the universities and enrolled mainly the sons of the growing middle classes and of the lower gentry. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the most famous among them were the Jesuit colleges in France, the Pietist schools of Germany, and the Dissenting academies in England. Some of these last were relatively secular institutions founded by private educational entrepreneurs. These schools were not universities in the legal sense, since they had no charters of corporation; however, their functions were parallel to those of the university arts faculties, and some of them taught everything that a university did, including theology, law, and medicine. In the curriculum of the new schools certain innovations were developed, such as the study of Greek, Hebrew, and modern languages, and the new schools were among the first to inaugurate the study of history, modern mathematics, and some natural science. Moreover, they experimented with methods of education, some of which were the precursors of the seminar and the laboratory. Some of the new colleges were devoted to advanced learning for its own sake, the most famous of these
193
being the College des Lecteurs Royaux—later the College de France—in Paris and Gresham College in London. Yet these new colleges did no more than the older universities to foster the development of the natural sciences or the new developments in literature, painting, sculpture, and music. It was left to individuals working on their own to cultivate these two areas, although these individuals were usually connected with some learned society or academy. There are interesting parallels between the emergence of learned societies in the seventeenth century and the beginnings of the universities in the twelfth century. The learned societies started as spontaneous gatherings of people who were interested in scholarship and science and who needed an institutional framework both to facilitate the exchange of ideas and to provide support—psychological and, more rarely, material—for their activities. In the second half of the seventeenth century, the learned societies were granted royal charters and public recognition; princes all over Europe became interested in founding academies. Where there were few savants, as in Russia or Prussia, they were invited to come from other countries. The outstanding scientists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—men like Oldenburg, Descartes, Leibniz, Euler, and Lagrange—spent much of their time as itinerant savants. Unlike the universities, the academies (with the exception of academies of art) did no teaching. Members were elected in recognition of merit, but some aristocrats were also included. In England, France, and Italy, the functions of intellectual institutions became differentiated: private colleges took over general higher education; universities trained for the ministry, medicine, and, frequently, the law; while research was undertaken independently by scholars associated with the academies. In the newer and smaller centers of learning (especially in Scotland, Holland, Switzerland, Germany, and Sweden) the universities continued to combine the three functions. This was probably due partly to their smallness, which did not allow much division of labor, and partly to their newness, which spared them a great deal of the traditionalism based on hereditary privileges and other vested interests. These smaller centers became leaders in the new fields of learning; they taught natural science, medicine, history, and philology at an advanced level, whereas in the great cultural centers of France, England, and Italy these subjects could generally be studied only privately. But in spite of the fact that the superiority of the
194
UNIVERSITIES
peripheral universities was so widely recognized that they were able to attract students from foreign countries, they had no influence on the institutional structure of higher learning. Instead of serving as models, they tended to adopt the prestigious and obsolete traditions of the older centers. By the end of the eighteenth century, the universities were being strongly criticized, and many intellectuals regarded them as moribund institutions. University instruction was under attack because it almost entirely ignored new developments in science and scholarship. This exclusion of the highest levels of intellectual activity from the universities might not in itself have aroused protest (today a similar situation exists in the creative arts) if the universities had not allied themselves, in some of the absolutist countries, with the church and the state in interfering with the freedom of education and publication. In the economically more backward areas, where there were few channels of mobility for talented young people, the universities blocked the only attractive intellectual career opportunities. Many intellectuals, therefore, had the same contempt for the universities that the new entrepreneurs had for the monopolistic guilds, and they envied the privileges of the academies as the middle classes envied the privileges of the aristocracy. Since the results of university teaching were poor, some critics recommended the replacement of the universities by professional schools. Such schools were indeed established by some of the absolutist monarchs, especially in medicine and in the new profession of civil and mining engineering. In England professional schools arose without the intervention of the state, especially in medicine. Hospitals and proprietary medical schools became the accepted means for medical training in England and spread from there to the United States. The emergence of the modern university During the last decade of the eighteenth century the academic system was thoroughly transformed. In France, the obsolete university corporations as well as the academies were abolished in 1793, but in the Napoleonic era they gradually reappeared in a changed form as parts of a centrally conceived and directed system of higher education. The new system was pragmatic, using the different types of institutions that had evolved over the centuries to train people for different purposes. New institutions were also established in response to new needs, and the whole system was placed under the direction of the central civil service. In Germany, although the mood of the intelli-
gentsia was also revolutionary, a different course was followed. The universities retained their corporate privileges and their place among the traditional estates of society, but their organization was brought into conformity with the administrative realities of modern state financing and supervision. The level of intellectual activity was raised by making the faculties of arts and sciences the central parts of the universities and by appointing members of the new intelligentsia to chairs in these faculties. In England the transition was gradual. Beginning in the sixteenth century, a great variety of professional and scientific associations had been established there, as in France. But unlike those in France, the English institutions were founded and financed by private individuals. Their increasing prestige, relative to that of the old universities, threatened the intellectual hegemony of the upper classes. About 1840, in response to this threat and to pressure from both the government and from public opinion, the universities began to reform themselves, and by the end of the century they once again dominated the academic scene. Toward the middle of the nineteenth century, the quality of the German university system became outstanding. The universities were at that time an almost autonomous subsystem of German society. Because of the political and economic backwardness of the German-language area and the consequent shortage of attractive career opportunities, there was a large supply of able aspirants for academic careers. Education and culture became the most effective bonds between the various parts of the politically fragmented nation. The universities were lavishly supported by the different states and were vigorously competitive. Under these conditions, academic interests flourished: new fields of purely scientific interest could develop without having to convince government departments or charitable laymen of their usefulness, and research was recognized as an important function of the university. The success of the German university system convinced academic public opinion in other countries that an academic system composed of relatively autonomous, multipurpose units was superior to a centrally coordinated system of specialized institutions. The German system came to serve as a model: it was copied in central and northern Europe and decisively influenced the reformation of the English and American academic systems; to a more limited extent, it exerted an influence in eastern Europe (German influence there was somewhat attenuated by that of the French) and on
UNIVERSITIES the French, Italian, and Spanish-Portuguese academic traditions. Under the impact of the German innovations, universities consisting of several faculties were re-established in France in 1896. The German system was also adopted in Japan. Contemporary academic systems. At the end of the nineteenth century there were three influential academic systems: the German, the French, and the English. (The importance of the Italian universities had receded since the sixteenth century; although the United States had evolved the most important features of its academic system, this system was not yet influential.) All the major European systems (as well as the system in the United States) had the following characteristics: education was free of church control; hereditary claims to university posts were abolished; a clearcut distinction was made between secondary and higher education; modern scientific and humanistic subjects were accorded a central place in the curriculum; and technological studies were given university status. At present, the typical institution in Germany, England, and the United States is the university in which a wide variety of subjects is taught and in which research is conducted; most of the "pure" subjects and many of the applied ones are covered. In these countries there exist institutes of technology with university standing; the institutes teach many different subjects—often the social sciences and the humanities as well as the natural sciences. Because of the variety of their functions, both universities and institutes have great potentiality for growth. Specialized research and training institutions play a relatively marginal role in these systems. The special characteristics of the U.S. system evolved between 1860 and 1910. Before this period, the system of higher education consisted principally of church-affiliated colleges and a variety of professional schools. The Morrill Act of 1862 was the first step in the transformation of the system; it provided grants of land to the states to be used or sold for the support of colleges that would emphasize the teaching of agriculture and the "mechanic arts." This legislation provided an impetus for the development of academic teaching and research in agriculture, as well as in engineering and a variety of other applied fields. In the course of time most of the land-grant colleges developed into full-fledged universities, thus establishing the basis for a wide-spread and relatively open system of higher education. The view that higher education can legitimately be practical and diversified was not confined to the land-grant institutions but was
195
also adopted by many of the older universities. As a result, American universities have become much more differentiated institutions than European ones. They teach and train students at three different levels: a minimally specialized liberal education (bachelor's degree) such as does not exist in Europe at all; professional training (LL.B., M.D., master's degree) in a much greater variety of fields than European training offers; and the training of scholars and researchers (PH.D.), of which only the beginnings exist in Europe. The French system consists of universities that perform teaching functions comparable to those performed by universities elsewhere and a governmental research organization—the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)—that runs parallel to the universities, often employs the same staff as the universities, and provides facilities and funds for research. In addition, there are the Grandes Ecoles: the Polytechnique and the Ecole Normale Superieure provide professional education for a highly selected elite, and the College de France and the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes offer high-level instruction untrammeled by the requirements of degree courses. Furthermore, the Academie Frangaise still has important symbolic functions. In France, each type of institution performs a limited range of functions, and the system as a whole is centrally directed. An essentially similar structure was adopted in the Soviet Union after the Revolution. The different types of academic systems reflect differences in general social and political organization. In France and the Soviet Union, a central bureaucracy makes academic policy for the whole country, while the United States and Germany have federal political structures and systems of independent, competing universities. The social and political organization of Britain has produced a system that is somewhere between the other two: on the one hand, Britain is a centralized state— London playing a role similar to that of Paris in France—but, on the other hand, there exist important traditions of cultural autonomy in Scotland, Wales, and the centers of religious dissent in the North and the Midlands. Universities rather than specialized institutions predominate, but the system has a centralized, hierarchic structure, with Oxford, Cambridge, and the University of London at the apex of the hierarchy. Universities and the social structure. Although the university reforms of the nineteenth century recognized the importance of modern scientific and scholarly subjects and of the intellectuals interested in them, these reforms did not change the
196
UNIVERSITIES
place of the universities in the rigidly hierarchic European class system. The universities, therefore, continued to emphasize training for the established professions of law, medicine, and—where this remained within the university—theology. Secondary school teaching was the only "new" profession for which nineteenth-century universities provided training. The introduction of such disciplines as engineering, bacteriology, physiological chemistry, psychiatry, the social sciences, and contemporary philosophy usually met with resistance. This rigidity gave rise to a new wave of intellectual dissatisfaction, which in the mid-nineteenth century found its expression in polemical writings and led to the radicalization of students and intellectuals in general. There were other sources of discontent among the intelligentsia, some of them inherent in the very process of university education. Universities and other academic institutions had been established in central and eastern Europe to foster autonomous national cultures and to develop the professional manpower needed for the services of the state. Tuition was free or relatively cheap, and students and faculty enjoyed enviable privileges exempting them from harassment by the police and by local authorities and from the oppressive religious and social control characteristic of villages and provincial cities. Becoming a student, therefore, was an attractive path to quasi social mobility. Even if they lived in poverty, students enjoyed some of the privileges of upper-middle-class status, as well as the pleasures of living in large cities with numerous cultural facilities. For these reasons young people were attracted to the universities, regardless of their interests and abilities or of the demand for the services of graduates. Many of these students were practically unemployable because the European universities trained them in a very limited range of disciplines. Moreover, they were, in a sense, spoiled: not only were they unwilling to forgo their privileges as students for risky careers but also, having experienced life in the capital cities during their studies, they were reluctant to return to the backward provinces. The provinces, which were most in need of educated manpower, were thus drained of their ablest young men, while university graduates emerged as a revolutionary intelligentsia that formed the vanguard of subversive movements. To some extent, of course, the size of the student body increased in response to a demand for certain kinds of professional men—secondary school teachers, civil servants (who were required to have law degrees), and doctors. But these spurts
of growth were invariably followed by waves of unemployment. Such a recession occurred in Germany, mainly as a result of the satiation of the demand for doctors, and as a result the studentpopulation ratio dropped from 6.5/10,000 in the 1890s to 5/10,000 in the next decade (calculated from statistics in Samuel & Thomas 1949, p. 112). Following World War I there was a steep rise in the demand for law graduates to man the newly established civil services in those countries that had gained their independence or had been granted new territories—the Baltic countries, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Rumania, and Yugoslavia; but with the inevitable slowdown of the rate of new employment of civil servants, a slump followed. In the countries that had lost territory, especially Austria and Hungary, there was an excess supply of professionals after the war. The disproportion between the supply of university graduates and the demand for their services became acute in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, a problem that was aggravated but not basically caused by the economic depression. The studentpopulation ratios, which ranged in 1913 from 7/10,000 to 11/10,000, rose by 1934 to a range of 11/10,000 to 30/10,000 (Ben-David 19631964, p. 263). Curriculums, however, had changed very little, and approximately half of the students studied law and medicine (ibid., pp. 266-267). To cope with the unemployment of intellectuals and their consequent alienation, university expansion was drastically curtailed by governmental action or by the workings of the free manpower market. The only academic systems that escaped serious crises during this period were those in the United States and the Soviet Union. The relatively open class structure of the former and the governmentenforced egalitarianism in the latter led to important changes in the curriculums in their academic institutions. In the United States, expansion took place especially in such new fields as education, the social sciences, business, social work, engineering, and technological studies; in the Soviet Union, the fields of education and technology were greatly expanded. These academic systems, therefore, adjusted with little friction to the manpower needs of the changing economies in the two countries and expanded without hindrance. In the United States the student-population ratio grew to 83/10,000 in 1934 and to 185/10,000 in 1958; the comparable ratios for the Soviet Union were 31/10,000 in 1934 and 105/10,000 in 1958 (ibid., p. 263). In neither of these countries was the alienated intelligentsia an important social category in the
UNIVERSITIES 1920s and 1930s; instead, the professional expert became increasingly important. Academic systems since World War n Because of their success in research and the creation of professional expertise, as well as their political and economic importance, the United States and—to a somewhat more limited extent—the Soviet Union have furnished the main academic models for other areas of the world. They account for about half of the world's student population, and their contribution to research is overwhelming. Their influence is limited only by the political cleavage in the world and by the prevalence of English and French traditions in the previously colonial countries of Africa and of Spanish-Portuguese traditions in Latin America. Since World War n higher education has greatly expanded in Asia. In Japan, which has one of the highest student-population ratios in the world, expansion has led to the founding of many new universities of different types and the adoption of a pattern of studies modeled on the diversified American curriculum. The influence of the American pattern has also been considerable in India. Despite the increase in the number of universities in Asia, there is still not nearly enough room for the admission of all applicants, nor has it been possible to prepare the growing number of students adequately for professional service or to prevent their studying fields for which there is little demand. The problem of useless training is most severe in India and Indonesia, where, following European and local traditions, higher education is still regarded as a means of access to the privileged classes rather than as training for productive work. Although similar traditions existed in prerevolutionary China, they have been counteracted by the adoption of the Soviet system, in which students are assigned fields of study according to manpower plans. However, prerevolutionary conditions of secondary education still limit the number of candidates for higher education; despite China's rapid rate of growth—enrollment in institutions of higher education increased from 116,500 in 1949/1950 to 434,000 in 1957/ 1958—the number of students relative to the population is still very low (Orleans 1961, pp. 68-69) as compared with India, which had 833,450 students in 1957, and Japan, which had 636,200 students in 1958 (Ben-David 1963-1964, p. 262). Although the rate of growth in Africa has been high—an increase from 70,000 students in 1950 to 141,000 in 1959—most of this growth has occurred in the United Arab Republic, which alone has more than 100,000 students. South Africa also
197
has a large concentration of students (37,000 in 1958), most of whom are white (United Nations . . . 1963, vol. 1, pp. 113, 119-124). This rapid growth has created problems of intellectual underemployment similar to those in Asia. The development of higher education in west, central, and east Africa is only beginning, and the universities in these regions face the immediate problem of finding a sufficient number of qualified students and staff; the latter are to a large extent foreigners. Development in South America has been relatively slow, the number of students increasing from 179,000 to 326,000 during the period 1950-1959 (ibid., p. 113). Even this modest increase has, however, created serious problems. The universities have coped with the growing numbers of students by limiting enrollment and by introducing difficult examinations at the end of the first year. These measures make the university attractive to potentially mobile young people faced with relatively rigid class structures, but do not provide these youths with efficient means for actual mobility. The result is the emergence of a student body that is frustrated in its aspirations and prone to revolutionary action. The rate of growth of the student population in Europe has been somewhat accelerated since World War n. Student-population ratios have almost doubled since the 1930s and in 1958 ranged from 30/10,000 to 50/10,000 in most European countries. Only in Britain and Norway were the ratios as low as 20/10,000; since 1958 there has been a steep rise in the student-population ratio in Britain (Ben-David 1963-1964, p. 263). The problem of the underemployment of intellectuals has disappeared, and in the natural sciences, technology, and the social sciences there is often a shortage of trained people. In eastern Europe there has been a reform of the system of higher education based on the Soviet pattern. Most of the expansion has taken place by the establishment of new specialized institutions of technology and education; the universities have grown very little. In western Europe the university has remained the most prevalent form of higher educational institution, but without any basic reform in organization or structure. A number of new universities have been founded, and all the existing ones have been considerably expanded—average enrollment per university in western Europe grew from about 3,590 in 1950 to 4,350 in 1959 (United Nations . . . 1963, vol. 1, p. 132). There has been a marked decrease in the proportion of law and medical students (Ben-David 1963-1964, pp. 266-267).
198
UNIVERSITIES
Training in technological fields, the social sciences, business, and other professions has been expanded or introduced at a great many universities. But only in England, where colleges of technology have been granted university status and there are plans to raise teacher training to university level, is there a true diversification of higher education. JOSEPH BEN-DAVID [See also ACADEMIC FREEDOM; EDUCATION; TEACHING.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
ANDERSON, C. ARNOLD 1956 The Social Status of University Students in Relation to Type of Economy: An International Comparison. Volume 5, pages 51-63 in World Congress of Sociology, Third, Transactions. London: International Sociological Association. ANDERSON, C. ARNOLD; and BOWMAN, MARY JEAN (editors) 1965 Education and Economic Development. Chicago: Aldine. ANDERSON, C. ARNOLD; and SCHNAPER, MIRIAM 1952 School and Society in England: Social Backgrounds of Oxford and Cambridge Students. Washington: Public Affairs Press. ANGER, HANS 1960 Problems der deutschen Universitdt: Bericht iiber eine Erhebung unter Professoren und Dozenten. Tubingen (Germany): Mohr. ARMYTAGE, W. H. G. 1955 Civic Universities: Aspects of a British Tradition. London: Benn. ASHRY, ERIC 1958 Technology and the Academics: An Essay on Universities and the Scientific Revolution. London and New York: Macmillan. ASHRY, ERIC 1964 African Universities and Western Tradition. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. ASHRY, ERIC 1966 Universities: British, Indian, African. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. BEN-DAVID, JOSEPH 1963-1964 Professions in the Class System of Present Day Societies: A Trend Report and Bibliography. Current Sociology 12:247-330. -> Provides a social history of the transformation of the professions; emphasizes relations with higher education; includes a bibliography. BEN-DAVID, JOSEPH; and SLOCZOWER, A. 1962 Universities and Academic Systems in Modern Societies. Archives europeenn.es de sociologie; European Journal of Sociology 3:45-84. BERELSON, BERNARD 1960 Graduate Education in the United States. New York: McGraw-Hill. BILLROTH, THEODOR (1876) 1924 The Medical Sciences in the German Universities: A Study in the History of Civilization. New York: Macmillan. -» First published in German. BRUNSCHWIG, HENRY 1947 La crise de I'etat prussien a la fin du XVIIIs siecle et la genese de la mentalite romantique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. BRYSON, GLADYS 1945 Man and Society: The Scottish Inquiry of the Eighteenth Century. Princeton Univ. Press. BUSCH, ALEXANDER 1956 Stellenplan und Lehrkorperstruktur der Universitdten und Hochschulen in der Bundesrepublik und in Berlin (West) 1953—1954. Untersuchungen zur Lage der deutschen Hochschullehrer, Vol. 2. Gottingen (Germany): Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
BUSCH, ALEXANDER 1959 Die Geschichte des Privatdozenten: Eine soziologische Studie zur grossbetrieblichen Entwicklung der deutschen Universitdten. Stuttgart (Germany): Enke. CAPLOW, THEODORE; and McGEE, REECE J. 1958 The Academic Marketplace. New York: Basic Books. -> A paperback edition was published in 1961 by Wiley. CARDWELL, DONALD S. L. 1957 The Organisation of Science in England: A Retrospect. Melbourne and London: Heinemann. CARR-SAUNDERS, A. M.; and WILSON, P. A. (1933) 1964 The Professions. Oxford: Cass. COLEMAN, JAMES S. (editor) 1965 Education and Political Development. Studies in Political Development, No. 4. Princeton Univ. Press. COMMISSION ON HUMAN RESOURCES AND ADVANCED TRAINING 1954 America's Resources of Specialized Talent: A Current Appraisal and a Look Ahead. New York: Harper. CONFERENCE ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF HIGHER EDUCATION IN AFRICA, TANANARIVE, 1962 1963 The Development of Higher Education in Africa: Report. Paris: UNESCO. CORSON, JOHN J. 1960 Governance of Colleges and Universities. New York: McGraw-Hill. COUSIN, VICTOR (1846) 1850 Instruction publique (en France sous le gouvernement de juillet). New ed., 3 vols. Paris: Pagnerre. CURLE, ADAM 1963 Strategy for Developing Societies: A Study of Educational and Social Factors in Relation to Economic Groivth. London: Tavistock. DEWITT, NICHOLAS 1961a Education and Professional Employment in the U.S.S.R. Washington: National Science Foundation. DEWITT, NICHOLAS 1961fo Reorganization of Science and Research in the U.S.S.R. Science 133:1981-1991. FARMER, PAUL 1950 Nineteenth-century Ideas of the University: Continental Europe. Pages 3-24 in Margaret A. Clapp (editor), The Modern University. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press. FERBER, CHRISTIAN VON 1956 Die Entwicklung des Lehrkorpers der deutschen Universitdten und Hochschulen 1864-1954. Untersuchungen zur Lage der deutschen Hochschullehrer, Vol. 3. Gottingen (Germany): Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. FLEXNER, ABRAHAM 1925 Medical Education: A Comparative Study. New York: Macmillan. FLEXNER, ABRAHAM 1930 Universities: American, English, German. Oxford Univ. Press. GREAT BRITAIN, COMMITTEE ON HIGHER EDUCATION 1963 Higher Education. Report of the committee appointed by the Prime Minister, under the chairmanship of Lord Robbins, 1961-1963. Papers by Command, Cmnd. 2154. London: H.M. Stationery Office. HALSEY, A. H. 1962 British Universities. Archives europeennes de sociologie; European Journal of Sociology 3:85-101. HANS, NICHOLAS A. 1951 New Trends in Education in the Eighteenth Century. London: Routledge. Higher Education in East Africa. White paper issued jointly by the governments of Kenya, Tanganyika, Uganda, and Zanzibar. 1958 Entebbe (Uganda): Government Printer. KINDLE, BROOKE 1956 The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America: 1735-1789. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press.
UNWIN, GEORGE HOFSTADTER, RICHARD; and METZGER, WALTER P.
1955
The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS AND LECTURERS 1961 The Status of University Teachers: Reports From Sixteen Countries. Prepared with the assistance of UNESCO. Edited by Richard H. Shryock. Ghent (Belgium): The Association. IRSAY, STEPHEN D' 1933-1935 Histoire des univer-sites; francaises et etrangeres des origines a nos jours. 2 vols. Paris: Picard. -> Volume 1: Moyen age et renaissance. Volume 2: Du XVI siecle a 1860. A supplement by Rene Aigrain, Les universites catholiques, was published in 1935. KERR, CLARK 1963 The Uses of the University. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. KNELLER, GEORGE F. 1955 Higher Learning in Britain. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press. KONIG, RENE 1935 Vom Wesen der deutschen Universitdt. Berlin: Runde. KOTSCHNIG, WALTER M. 1937 Unemployment in the Learned Professions: An International Study of Occupational and Educational Planning. Oxford Univ. Press. LAZARSFELD, PAUL F.; and THIELENS, WAGNER JR. 1958 The Academic Mind: Social Scientists in a Time of Crisis. A report of the Bureau of Applied Social Research, Columbia University. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. -» With a field report by David Riesman. LE GOFF, JACQUES 1957 Les intellectuels au moyen age. Paris: Editions du Seuil. MERZ, JOHN T. (1903-1914) 1912-1928 A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century. 4 vols. Edinburgh and London: Blackwood. Nachwuchsfragen im Spiegel einer Erhebung, 1953—1955. Untersuchungen zur Lage der deutschen Hochschullehrer, Vol. 1. 1956 Gottingen (Germany): Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. ORGANIZATION FOR EUROPEAN ECONOMIC COOPERATION 1964 Aspects economiques de Venseignement superieur. Paris: The Organization. ORLEANS, LEO A. 1961 Professional Manpower and Education in Communist China. Washington: Government Printing Office. ORNSTEIN, MARTHA (1913) 1963 The Role of Scientific Societies in the Seventeenth Century. 3d ed. Hamden, Conn.: Shoe String Press. PAULSEN, FRIEDRICH (1893) 1906 The German Universities and University Study. New York: Scribner. -» First published in German. PEVSNER, NIKOLAUS 1940 Academies of Art: Past and Present. Cambridge Univ. Press; New York: Macmillan. POWICKE, FREDERICK M. (1951)1964 Ways of Medieval Life and Thought. New York: Biblo & Tannen. -» See especially pages 149-197 and 213-229 on the medieval university. RASHDALL, HASTINGS (1895) 1958 The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages. New ed., 3 vols. Oxford Univ. Press. -*• Volume 1: Salerno, Bologna, Paris. Volume 2: Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Scotland, etc. Volume 3: English Universities; Student Life. Ross, EARLE D. 1942 Democracy's College: The Landgrant Movement in the Formative Stage. Ames: Iowa State College Press. SAMUEL, RICHARD; and THOMAS, R. HINTON 1949 Edu-
199
cation and Society in Modern Germany. London: Routledge. SCHNABEL, FRANZ 1925 Die Anfange des technischen Hochschulwesens. Pages 1-44 in Karlsruhe, Technische Hochschule, Festschrift anldsslich des 100 jdhrigen Bestehens der Technischen Hochschule . . . . Karlsruhe (Germany): Miiller. SCHNABEL, FRANZ 1934 Deutsche Geschichte im neunzehnten Jahrhundert. Volume 3: Erfahrungswissenschaften und Technik. Freiburg (Germany): Herder. STORR, RICHARD J. 1953 The Beginnings of Graduate Education in America. Univ. of Chicago Press. TEWKSBURY, DONALD G. 1932 The Founding of American Colleges and Universities Before the Civil War: With Particular Reference to the Religious Influences Bearing Upon the College Movement. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. UNITED NATIONS EDUCATIONAL, SCIENTIFIC AND CULTURAL ORGANIZATION 1963 The International Study of University Admissions: Access to Higher Education. 2 vols. Paris: UNESCO & International Association of Universities. U.S. OFFICE OF EDUCATION 1955 Education for the Professions. Washington: Government Printing Office. VEBLEN, THORSTEIN (1891-1913) 1961 The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation, and Other Essays. New York: Russell. VEBLEN, THORSTEIN (1918) 1957 The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men. New York: Sagamore. VEYSEY, LAURENCE R. 1965 The Emergence of the American University. Univ. of Chicago Press. WEBER, MAX (1919) 1946 Science as a Vocation. Pages 129-156 in Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Translated and edited by H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. -» First published as "Wissenschaft als Beruf." WILSON, LOGAN 1942 The Academic Man: A Study in the Sociology of a Profession. Oxford Univ. Press.
UNWIN, GEORGE George Unwin (1870-1925), English economic historian, was born at Stockport, the eldest of six children of working-class parents. He left school when he was 13 to become an office boy in a firm of hatmakers for which his mother had previously worked. He was fortunate, however, to have an employer who kindled in him an interest in books and in politics; this interest was developed by attendance at the Unitarian Chapel, the Mechanics Institute, and the Stockport Literary Society. At the age of 20 he won a scholarship to the University College of Cardiff, but the £20 this brought him annually did little more than cover his fees. It was to the privations of the three years at Cardiff that he used to attribute the frailty of his constitution in later life. A second scholarship opened the way to Oxford, which he entered at the age of 23 (along with another youth of humble origin from Stockport, Ernest Barker, who was to rise to eminence
200
UNWIN, GEORGE
as a political philosopher and historian). After four years of exciting intellectual activity, culminating in a first in Greats, he spent a few months under Schmoller at Berlin and from there went to the London School of Economics, where he collected voluminous material on the history of the fraternities, guilds, and companies of the City. Unwin's first salaried post was as private secretary to Leonard (later Lord) Courtney—then engaged in vigorous opposition to the Boer War— who was to be his close, lifelong friend and adviser. The post allowed him leisure to continue historical research, and in 1904 he produced a tightly packed volume, Industrial Organisation in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, in which the essential economic conflict of the period is displayed, not as between capital and labor, but as between trading capital and industrial capital. This was followed by an illuminating study of the woolen industry of Suffolk and, in 1908, by The Gilds and Companies of London, with a brilliant opening chapter on the place of the guilds in the history of western Europe. The same year saw his appointment as lecturer in economic history at Edinburgh, and in 1910 the University of Manchester created for him the first chair in the subject in England. At the University of Manchester, Unwin taught in the history school directed by T. F. Tout. A volume of essays written by him and several of his postgraduate students, Finance and Trade Under Edward HI (1918), demonstrated, among much else, that far from having been "the father of English commerce," Edward was a serious impediment to its development. William Cunningham's generous acceptance of this revision was the source of great satisfaction to Unwin. During his 14 years at Manchester, Unwin planned and began works on several major themes; but the demands made on him by his students and an urge to engage in political protest against both the imperialist and the socialist trends of thought of his day made the completion of them impossible. The discovery by an extramural student of a mass of business documents in an old stable in Derbyshire, however, led to the publication in 1924 of Samuel Oldknow and the Arkwrights, in which the industrial revolution was depicted, not as the disaster many have thought it, but as a seedbed of those various voluntary communities (the modern family, friendly societies, trade unions, churches, schools, universities, and so on) which in Unwin's view were more fundamental to the growth of society than was the compulsory, authoritarian state. A few months after it appeared, Unwin died, at the height of his powers, in his 56th year.
Much of Unwin's most characteristic work was published posthumously in a volume of papers edited, with a masterful biography, by R. H. Tawney (see Unwin 1927, especially Tawney's essay on pp. xi-lxxiv). But it was in informal conversations, rather than in writings or lectures, that his wealth of historical learning, his gentle irony, his native shrewdness and humanity, were most fully revealed. His economic ideas were drawn largely from Adam Smith; his political doctrines from T. H. Green, William James, and (in later years) R. M. Maclver. He regarded the state as a lion in the path of progress, inimical to the voluntary associations on which his social philosophy centered. It was the decline of state intervention in the late eighteenth century that led not only to a rapid growth of industry but also to a rise of workingclass organizations in England long before these appeared in more closely regulated societies abroad (1904, p. 227). By demonstrating, for each period he touched, the inefficacy or hurtfulness of "policy," he opened the way for historical interpretations more in line with the thought of economists and sociologists. His influence on economic history in England has extended far beyond the field, wide as this was, of his own specialized researches. T. S. ASHTON [For the historical context of Unwin's work, see the biographies of CUNNINGHAM and TOYNBEE; for discussion of the subsequent development of Unwin's ideas, see HISTORY, article, on ECONOMIC HISTORY.] WORKS BY UNWIN
(1904) 1957 Industrial Organisation in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. London: Cass. 1907 Industries. Volume 2, pages 247-289 in The Victoria History of the County of Suffolk. Edited by William Page. London: Constable. (1908) 1964 The Gilds and Companies of London. 4th ed. New York: Barnes & Noble. (1918) 1962 Finance and Trade Under Edward HI. London: Cass. 1924 Samuel Oldknow and the Arkwrights: The Industrial Revolution at Stock-port and Marple. Manchester Univ. Press; New York: Longmans. 1927 Studies in Economic History: The Collected Papers of George Unwin' . . . . Edited with an introductory memoir by R. H. Tawney. London: Macmillan. -» A bibliography appears on pages 465-471. SUPPLEMENTARY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BARKER, ERNEST 1953 Age and Youth: Memories of Three Universities and Father of the Man. London and New York: Oxford Univ. Press. -> Details of Unwin's career are given on page 294. DANIELS, GEORGE W. 1926 George Unwin: A Memorial Lecture. Manchester Univ. Press; New York: Longmans.
URBAN REVOLUTION: Introduction URBAN PLANNING See PLANNING, SOCIAL, article on REGIONAL AND URBAN PLANNING.
URBAN REVOLUTION i. INTRODUCTION ii. EARLY CIVILIZATIONS OF THE NEW WORLD in. THE CONCEPT OF CIVILIZATION
Robert McC. Adams Rene Millon Pedro Armillas
INTRODUCTION
"Urban revolution" is a term introduced by V. Gordon Childe, an eminent Old World prehistorian, to describe the process by which preliterate agriculturists living in villages and towns first came to form larger, more complex, civilized societies. This process seems to have occurred, essentially independently and at different times, in several areas of the world. Not surprisingly, the precise qualities by which the first achievement of a civilized way of life in particular areas can be recognized are not always the same. Indeed, even the two features emphasized in Childe's formulation of the concept—the formation of cities and the invention of writing—apparently were not present in all instances. But although different cultural traditions exhibit very different formal characteristics, the effect of the urban revolution everywhere was to bring a new set of social and economic institutions decisively and relatively rapidly into positions of dominance. The term "urban revolution" describes the functional core of this process. Thus it is perhaps as apt as any to express the underlying regularities that appear in all the separate manifestations of the process. This was a transformation which, in its crucial importance for man's cultural development, is analogous to the neolithic (or foodproducing) revolution, which preceded it by many millenniums, and to the industrial revolution of our own era. The equation of "urbanism" with "civilization" is not new. For example, Strabo, the thoughtful and widely traveled Greek geographer, simply classified countries of his day that lacked cities as uncivilized. Fifteen hundred years later the spectacle of the great Aztec capital city in central Mexico prompted the invading Spaniards to compare Mesoamerican civilization with that of Europe; these comparisons have been eloquently preserved in the account of Bernal Diaz and in letters of Hernan Cortes to the Spanish emperor. However, the more immediate background for the concept of an urban revolution
201
lies not in the gradual systematization of this old equation but in the cultural evolutionism of Lewis Henry Morgan. Writing at a time when only scant knowledge of prehistory and early history existed, Morgan used contemporary ethnography and classical studies to posit a universal series of successive stages of cultural development. The sequence of savagery, barbarism, and civilization was marked by the cumulative growth of technology and the progressive unfolding of social institutions. Morgan's work turned attention away from the ethnocentric, valueladen connotations of "civilization" and toward its use as a term denoting an objective, qualitatively distinguishable stage of cultural complexity. He had the insight to recognize that the invention of writing was a convenient criterion of this development, if hardly its omnipresent or most essential feature. He failed, however, to recognize the advent of cities as a decisive development associated only with the stage of civilization in both its technological and institutional aspects. Childe's criteria of civilization During the sixty years separating Morgan's work and the beginnings of Childe's interest in the sequence of stages leading to civilization, early Near Eastern archeology and history had emerged as scholarly disciplines. Evidence became available, as it had not been earlier, through which urbanization could be identified as an axis of change accompanying the introduction of writing at the onset of civilization. Thus, when Childe came to identify other criteria of civilization, he was able to use an inductive approach and eschew pure speculation. Among these criteria Childe included classes of full-time specialists and rulers exempt from ordinary subsistence tasks, mechanisms such as taxes or tribute by which the "social surplus" could be concentrated in the hands of an elite, monumental public buildings devoted to the rulers or to the gods they served, the elaboration of exact and predictive sciences, extensive and regular foreign trade, and the emergence of a political organization based on residence rather than on kinship. This is, to be sure, a mixed bag of characteristics. Some, like monumental architecture, can be unequivocally documented from archeological evidence but are also known to have been associated with noncivilized peoples. Others, like exact and predictive sciences, are largely matters of interpretation from evidence that is at best fragmentary and ambiguous. Moreover, many of Childe's criteria, if not most, obviously must have emerged through a gradual, cumulative process in which it is
202
URBAN REVOLUTION: Introduction
not easy to distinguish differences in kind from those of degree. But if in this respect Childe's approach fails to exclude a subjective element, it also reflects a distinct conceptual advance over approaching the study of civilization within the framework of evolutionary stage theory. The concept of an urban revolution, after all, encourages us to view the attainment of civilization not as two disjunctive "before" and "after" steps but as a process of transformation in basic institutional patterns that occurred over a period of time. Distinguishing features of early civilized societies such as those elucidated by Childe obviously represent an extremely limited selection from the total range of cultural phenomena. However, their selection was not random but represents an emphasis on particular institutions thought to be somehow basic or crucial to the developmental process. For Childe himself, the central causative agencies behind the urban revolution were the cumulative growth of technology and the amassing and controlled utilization of food surpluses by newly emergent class societies. To some degree, this view undoubtedly reflects his commitment to a materialistic philosophy of history. Yet those who attach greater importance to changing ecological adaptations as the primary creative process leading to the appearance of civilizations find little to add to or take away from Childe's criteria. There are two reasons for this congruence of views. One is that the available evidence imposes severe limitations upon possible reconstructions. Since developed systems of writing appeared only as civilized societies approached maturity, documentary evidence is generally of secondary importance for understanding the initial periods of civilization. And in spite of substantial advances during recent years in the recovery and identification of organic materials (in some cases even permitting quantitative assessments of diet), the archeologist's interpretations of socioeconomic institutions and activities still rest heavily on inferences drawn from the imperishable vestiges of tools and weapons, ornaments, pottery, and architecture. Hence it is not surprising that the dominant archeological approach has remained phenomenological, with attention focused on the temporal and spatial relationships of the material objects themselves. There has been more emphasis on establishing chronological outlines and drawing up inventory lists for particular periods than on reconstructing the societal settings in which the objects were made and used. Furthermore, as interpretation becomes more disciplined, it becomes clear that fidelity to data of this limited
kind can only tend to impose a generally materialistic emphasis. A second reason for the congruence of views on the essential characteristics of early civilizations derives from the milieu of study in which prehistorians are trained. Since this milieu is primarily anthropological in character (particularly in the United States), some aspects of the traditional world view of anthropology have influenced the kinds of questions that are asked and the hypotheses and assumptions with which early urban development is analyzed. In general, anthropology has paid little attention to widespread regional or national patterns of culture or to the relationships of towns and cities to their hinterlands. The study of the emergence of cities also has tended to ignore these themes or to reduce them to the study of the diffusion of particular cultural elements. As the unit of study for anthropologists generally has been the community, so that of the prehistorian or protohistorian dealing with the urban revolution has been the excavation and analysis of the individual site. Not surprisingly, this study has become infused with a strongly integrative view of cultural development. Rather than dealing with the disorganization and dissonance of increasingly heterogeneous social groups, surely as potent a source of change as any, study has been focused mainly on the traditional styles, symbols, rituals, and institutions that uniquely distinguished a particular early civilization and that bound its components together. Despite differences over causal explanations, specialists on the problem have tended to unite in the assumption that the growth of the city can best be studied and understood as an organic, internal process, devoid of sharp discontinuities and significant external stimuli. They view civilization as both concentrated in and led by the major creative centers. Changes in subsistence The earliest zones in which the urban revolution took place were the great alluvial valleys of the Near East. While the food-producing revolution also seems to have occurred earliest in that general area, it is important to note that these two processes were not directly linked. Whatever its secondary effects on other aspects of culture and social organization, the food-producing revolution consisted essentially of a change in patterns of subsistence, a more selective and intensive adaptation of small communities to their immediate natural environments. The urban revolution, on the other hand, cannot be identified with substantial changes in subsistence.
URBAN REVOLUTION: Introduction It is primarily a matter of profound increase in the scale and complexity of society, together with the emergence of new political and religious institutions capable of organizing and integrating diverse social groups in an unprecedented urban setting. Nevertheless, in spite of differences in basic character, these two transformations do form a "unilineal" sequence. Without agriculture, without the production of storable food surpluses that could be concentrated by an elite and used for the support of persons engaged in activities not related to primary subsistence needs, the achievement of urban civilization would not have been possible. Of course, as shown by the long-continued practice of agriculture in many areas without the indigenous development of civilization, it follows only that the food-producing revolution was a necessary, not a sufficient, condition for this further transformation. That there were substantial differences between the agricultural regime of the village zone and that of the lowlands where civilization first developed, and that these may have furnished part of the stimulus which set the urban revolution in motion, is apparent not only from historical and archeological sources but also from the environmental conditions within the zones. The early villages occupied a diverse terrain of scattered oases, upland steppes, dissected hill flanks, and isolated mountain valleys, while the earliest instance of the urban revolution took place on the more compact and less differentiated lower plain of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Here, agriculture always required irrigation to supplement the inadequate rainfall. With irrigation, agricultural yields from the alluvial plain were probably always significantly higher than in the uplands, in relation to both cultivated area and labor input, even if Herodotus' claim of a two to three hundredfold return on seed is not borne out by temple records. On the plains, then, there was the possibility of substantial surpluses, particularly after the invention of the plow had vastly improved the methods of cultivating and irrigating the level, stoneless soils. But since the realization of this possibility was by no means inherent in the possibility itself, the concept of surplus is one that continues to arouse much debate. While the term may be used to describe a precondition for urban life, it must be carefully applied. As Polanyi and his co-workers have argued, actual agricultural surpluses are always defined and mobilized in a particular institutional setting. Too frequently the term is used loosely to imply that the production of the agriculturalist that was in excess of his family's own needs was a
203
kind of prior, self-generating, independent variable and that the social arrangements for extracting that surplus from him were introduced later. Perhaps this is so, but one might also argue that it was the growth of the religious and political institutions characteristic of civilization that induced or compelled farmers to convert their leisure and local specialization into agricultural produce delivered to distant elites. The evidence currently available simply does not permit a definitive choice among these and similar alternatives. There were several other subsistence features that appeared during the fifth and fourth millenniums B.C. that were just as important in precipitating the urban revolution as the magnitude of potential agricultural surpluses on the plains. The subsistence system was, in the first place, a complex system, involving products of field, garden, and fruit cultivation as well as animal husbandry and fishing, each with its own annual cycle of activities, variations in output, and specialized technology. Hence it must have encouraged the growth of the exchange and redistributive agencies characteristic of an urban setting, in contrast to the economic self-sufficiency and isolation of the early villages in which agriculture first was practiced. Second, each of the major components of subsistence was exposed to highly destructive natural hazards—floods, droughts, and insect infestations, to mention only three—while at the same time the relatively dry climate and the nature of the foodstuffs permitted extended periods of storage. Here we see an apparently strong inducement to the accumulation of food surpluses and thus perhaps also to the formation of political institutions for their collection, retention, and allocation. Finally, certain consequences of intensive agriculture, and especially of irrigation, surely helped set in motion those processes of increasing social stratification which lay at the core of the urban revolution. The available evidence on population density, patterns of settlement, and prices paid for fields in early Mesopotamia, fragmentary as it is, strongly suggests that potentially cultivable land on the alluvial plain was never in short supply in relation to population over the region at large. By contrast water for irrigation must always have been the scarce, primary variable, as indeed it remains today. And scarcity of water in turn implies that disproportionate importance and value must have been attached to lands adjacent to, and capable of being commanded by, the major sources of irrigation water. Such lands, together with the canals that supplied them, constituted both a capital resource
204
URBAN REVOLUTION: Introduction
and a balanced system capable of only limited expansion. In this sense, with the focus on the particular locality instead of the wider region, limitations in the supply of cultivable land must have rapidly become a potent source of economic inequality and intercommunity political rivalry. It also has been argued that the practice of irrigation was directly responsible for the formation of a managerial elite that in time came to exercise a monopoly of political and economic power. According to this "hydraulic theory," the planning, operation, and maintenance of large-scale irrigation systems necessarily placed despotic powers in the hands of administrative specialists, enabling these specialists to concentrate surpluses in their hands and to consolidate the earliest state apparatuses. This view, however, considerably overestimates the degree of centralized control needed for what were prevailingly canal systems of very limited scale and complexity. Moreover, ethnographic evidence suggests that the problems of irrigation were successfully met at the level of the local community throughout the period when the new elites characteristic of a civilization were being formed. Hence, at least in the Mesopotamian context, the managerial requirements of irrigation systems seem to represent a less important historical force in the precipitation of the urban revolution than the differential degrees of access to the main productive resources, land and water, differences that tended to encourage political rivalries and social stratification. The Mesopotamian prototype As it first occurred in lower Mesopotamia in the centuries immediately before and after 3000 B.C., the core of the urban revolution as a process of change seems to have consisted of a series of linked trends that were manifested in, but were not fully synonymous with, the criteria set forth by Childe. Apparently the first specialized administrative group, or ruling stratum, was composed of hierarchies of priests. These priests were associated with monumental temples and were in the service of gods who were regarded as resident in the individual communities. Why the initial emphasis should have been placed on a priesthood, as indeed also seems to have been the case in the formative stages of other early civilizations, remains a matter of conjecture. It may be argued that the concurrent emergence of unprecedentedly diverse and often conflicting social groups that characterized the urban revolution initially demanded a unified and heightened ritual expression of certain essential
structural themes simply in order to maintain social cohesion. But it should also be noted that part of the early prominence that we attach to religious institutions is only a reflection of the more formal, highly stylized setting and character of religious forms of social integration as compared with their political counterparts. It is, after all, only the physical remnants of these institutions with which the archeologist must work, and archeological evidence for ritual activities suggestive of a priesthood almost always will be inherently less ambiguous than for the more rapidly shifting channels and fluid forms of expression of political power. Overtly political controls maintained by these groups of religious specialists are not apparent, but the earliest written evidence indicates that they were already engaged in widely diversified economic activities. The temples constituted integrated economic units in which production and redistribution were not limited to subsistence products but gradually expanded to include the support of craftsmen as well as specialized scribes, priests, and administrators. As the bonds linking together the extended kin groups originally occupying certain communities were dissolved by emerging class differences, these communities came more and more to assume the characteristics of private estates. Both textual and archeological evidence clearly points to this process of social stratification and organization of sacred and secular communities along manorial lines as one of the central features of the urban revolution. But while the bulk of the agricultural population may have gradually assumed a serf-like status, outright slavery was not an important feature in the countryside. Even in the cities the percentage of slaves remained small, although since they were concentrated in the larger secular and sacred establishments, their presence may have had a strategic effect in accelerating the stratification process as a whole. An equally strategic and closely related process was the emergence of an explicitly political basis for the organization of new and larger communities comprising a number of manorial units. To judge from the sequence of societal forms implied by myths and semihistorical epics thought to have originated during this period, the role of temporary war leader was institutionalized and made permanent at about the same time as monumental private residences ("palaces") and tombs richly stocked with luxury goods and weapons appear in the archeological record. Warfare seems to have become more chronic and sanguinary, encouraging the con-
URBAN REVOLUTION: Introduction solidation of dispersed settlements into composite city-states, where it became the business of hereditary dynasts to organize the defense with walls, supplies of costly weaponry such as chariots, regular soldiery, and militia drawn from the populace at large. These first cities, having evolved in a few centuries from small, temple-dominated towns of about the same size as the numerous agricultural villages that were widely scattered over the alluvial landscape, grew to include up to 400 hectares within their walls and probably were occupied by up to several tens of thousands of inhabitants. The king of such a city-state, increasingly free of the traditional restraints imposed by other manorial groupings similar to the one from which he (or his ancestors) had first emerged as a successful war leader, naturally sought to consolidate both his internal and external position through conquest of his neighbors. Foodstuffs, luxury goods from looted temples, arable lands, and war captives to serve in the palaces and temples were among the prizes of battle. Foreign trade, involving the exchange of textiles and metal implements for timber, ores, and other raw materials, was necessarily expanded greatly. It now had to meet not only the enhanced military and ritual demands of the king and the temple but also the increasing private demand of craft specialists for the exchange of their products through a market. If the foregoing reconstruction is reasonably accurate, it prompts further scrutiny of the criteria previously identified with the urban revolution. The development of social stratification and the replacement of kin-based and temple-based modes of organization by increasingly autocratic political institutions were clearly evident trends that seem to have been primary motive forces for the change. Urbanization, on the other hand, is more difficult to identify as an independent factor. While eventually it may be found that there was substantial population growth during this period, according to present evidence the physical process of urbanization involved primarily the redistribution of population, through the abandonment of hundreds of smaller settlements in the hinterlands and the coalescence of formerly scattered settlements. This process in turn was consequent upon the rising importance of politico-military leadership. Further light can be shed on this problem only by diverting some of the archeological attention that is now concentrated on the aesthetically more promising city ruins toward the tracing of the fortunes of smaller outlying settlements. The case is similar with regard to the increasing
205
specialization of the crafts, the proliferation of nonfood producers, and the greatly expanded volume and variety of foreign trade. If it is always futile to seek to completely disentangle "causes" and "effects" in a complex historical sequence, at least it can be said that these developments were largely posterior to, and hence hardly responsible for, the major political and economic trends that initially constituted the urban revolution. There does not seem to be any factual basis for regarding advances in the organization of the crafts and in the distribution of their products, or advances in Mesopotamian technology itself, as primary and essentially selfenergizing factors leading to the achievement of civilization. It has also been demonstrated through ethnographic example that full-time and part-time specialists were intergraded with one another, confounding the expectation of the modern analyst that those entirely divorced from a role in primary subsistence pursuits should form a distinct and separate group. Another set among our original criteria—namely, the elaboration of systems of writing and measurement and the appearance of the predictive "sciences"—stands in a still different relationship to the growth of civilization in Mesopotamia. While perhaps not a part of the nexus of cause and effect at the core of the urban revolution, these criteria certainly were more than just a part of its penumbra. They developed hand in hand with the major institutional forces, exercising a substantial influence on both their rate and direction of growth. To be sure, the presence of knowledge deserving to be called exact and scientific at this early period can be deduced only very tentatively from the existence of elaborately kept records and carefully replicated craft procedures. But since emphasis on both accounts and craft technologies was a vital part of Mesopotamia's long-standing cultural tradition, it seems justified to infer an early trend toward some more abstract and systematic view of the procedures that went into them. The effects of literacy are even more apparent. Invented at the very outset of the urban revolution, writing greatly enhanced both the scale and complexity of the administrative capabilities of the temple and the state. Perhaps still more important, it provided for the preservation and accumulation of knowledge and a world view through time, making possible the conscious synthesis and elaboration of a great tradition out of the variable and shortlived little traditions of the preliterate, preurban countryside. However, all but the formally recorded terminal point in the process is irrecoverable, since
206
URBAN REVOLUTION: Introduction
the preliterate archeological record is limited not merely to material remains but to relatively imperishable ones at that. Other early Oriental civilizations Most of the other areas of early and essentially autochthonous civilization in the Old World are even less adequately documented than Mesopotamia. However, since the substantive details of the rise of civilization in various centers are less significant for our purpose than the general process they represent, certain limited conclusions can be drawn. Insofar as the evidence permits comparison, it suggests that this process was essentially the same everywhere, even though the formal criteria by which it may be recognized differ considerably from case to case. At the same time, a brief survey of some of the major instances may serve not only to underline the patterns of regularity but also to indicate the range of differences. Closest to Mesopotamia was the civilization of Egypt; it was almost contemporary with that of Mesopotamia and apparently influenced by the latter for a brief but significant period just as its essential forms were crystallizing. Yet in matters of cultural content Egypt rapidly branched off onto an entirely independent course. At a broad institutional level, for example, the following contrasts may be noted: the strikingly early and successful imposition of unified state controls over an entire realm of hundreds or even thousands of component communities; the early and apparently sudden, yet fully elaborated, emergence of the ruler as both king and deity, and the failure of temple hierarchies to appear (at least according to present evidence) as agencies of smaller-scale administrative control prior to the ruler's emergence; and the relative stagnation of technology in spite of raw materials more abundant than Mesopotamia ever possessed. It has even been suggested by some authorities that Egypt lacked true cities until late in the second millennium B.C., although in the present state of Egyptian archeology there is little evidence either for or against this proposition. But beneath these clearly different structural features, the onset of Egyptian civilization still can be described in terms of the linked processes of increasing social stratification and the institutionalization of political leadership to supplement less formal and authoritarian patterns of control within a greatly expanded territorial state. At least in this general sense, Egypt can be said to have gone through an urban revolution similar to that of Mesopotamia, whether or not cities were present during the third millennium. The origins of the other early civilizations of
Asia, particularly those of the Indus Valley and north China, are still more obscure. If purely archeological modes of inference are reliable (the script has not been deciphered), Indus civilization was much like early Egypt with respect to the contrastive features mentioned above—save possibly that its twin capitals unquestionably were cities of a large (about one square kilometer) and exceptionally well-regulated kind. Chinese civilization, on the other hand, seems to have followed more closely the internally warring, urban, technologically precocious Mesopotamian model. The Indus Valley and probably also the north China plain supported irrigation societies, engendering additional similarities to Egypt and Mesopotamia. Both the Indus and Chinese civilizations developed considerably later than the civilizations of the Near East (the Indus perhaps half a millennium later, China probably less than a millennium and a half) and hence have sometimes been dismissed as merely derivative. Whatever the ultimate source of the stimuli that prompted their growth, however, each represented an essentially independent synthesis in response to historical and ecological forces within its own area and was in no sense imposed from outside. The years since Morgan's work on cultural evolution have brought a substantial and irreversible erosion in the universal series of immutable stages he had visualized as steps toward civilization taken, at a more or less rapid rate, by cultures all over the world. We are left with what can no longer be called a "unilinear" but instead must be considered a "multilinear" process. This process consists of a common core of certain basic trends that operated through time in widely different ways to transform a certain general type of society found in broadly similar ecological settings into a type of society that reflected a higher level of sociocultural scale and complexity. It has become equally clear that the transition from one organizational level to another was not "unidirectional" in the sense of smoothly modifying institutional patterns moving toward closer and closer approximations of patterns with which we are directly familiar. Urbanism in our own day, for example, is widely regarded as synonymous with pronounced social heterogeneity, secularism of outlook, impersonality of an increasing proportion of interpersonal contacts, and preoccupation with nonsubsistence pursuits. Yet in its initial appearance, as reflected in the examples discussed above, the city seems to have emerged as a physical form of settlement accompanied by few, and in some cases none, of these characteristics. For all the intensely
URBAN REVOLUTION: The New World rich and important potentialities that the urban revolution held for precivilized societies, it was only the initial step in the much fuller and longer process of urbanization as we know it today. ROBERT McC. ADAMS [See also CITY, article on FORMS AND FUNCTIONS; and the biography of CHILDE.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
ADAMS, ROBERT McC. 1966 The Evolution of Urban Society: Early Mesopotamia and Prehispanic Mexico. Chicago: Aldine. BRAIDWOOD, ROBERT J.; and WILLEY, GORDON R. (editors) 1962 Courses Toward Urban Life: Archeological Considerations of Some Cultural Alternates. Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology, No. 32. Chicago: Aldine. CHILDE, V. GORDON (1928) 1953 New Light on the Most Ancient East. 4th ed. New York: Praeger. -» First published as The Most Ancient East. CHILDE, V. GORDON 1950 The Urban Revolution. Town Planning Review 21:3-17. CHILDE, V. GORDON 1951 Social Evolution. New York: Schumann. FRIED, MORTON H. 1960 On the Evolution of Social Stratification and the State. Pages 713-731 in Stanley Diamond (editor), Culture in History: Essays in Honor of Paul Radin. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. JACOBSEN, THORKILD 1957 Early Political Development in Mesopotamia. Zeitschrift fur Assyriologie und vorderasiatische Archdologie 52:91—140. POLANYI, KARL; ARENSBERG, CONRAD M.; and PEARSON, HARRY W. (editors) 1957 Trade and Market in the Early Empires: Economies in History and Theory. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. REDFIELD, ROBERT 1953 The Primitive World and Its Transformations. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press. SJOBERG, GIDEON 1960 The Preindustrial City: Past and Present. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. STEWARD, JULIAN H. (editor) 1955a Irrigation Civilizations: A Comparative Study. Pan American Union, Social Science Monographs, No. 1. Washington: Pan American Union. STEWARD, JULIAN H. 1955b Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press. SYMPOSIUM ON URBANIZATION AND CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT IN THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, 1958 1960 City Invincible. Edited by Carl H. Kraeling and Robert McC. Adams. Univ. of Chicago Press. II EARLY CIVILIZATIONS OF THE NEW WORLD
In the early sixteenth century, Spanish conquerors destroyed flourishing urban civilizations in central Mexico and Peru. The conquerors' accounts of the cities and civilizations of the New World captured the imagination of Europe. In the four following centuries a great body of literature on these early civilizations accumulated, some of it histori-
207
cal or sociological; some anecdotal, theological or philosophical; some wildly speculative, some carefully reasoned. Two questions repeatedly occur throughout this literature: Where did these civilizations come from? How are they like and how are they different from the civilizations of the Old World? In the answers to these questions lies the significance of these civilizations for the social sciences, for the comparative study of early civilization in the Old World must reckon with the evidence from the New World. When the Spanish reached the Valley of Mexico in the high plateau of central Mexico, seven thousand feet above sea level, they marveled at the capital city of the Aztecs on the island in the valley's shallow lake system. They could not know that the city they were seeing, with its great pyramidtemples, market places, palaces, and gleaming white dwellings, was the product of a long period of growth and development, and that the earliest cities in Mexico antedated it by almost fifteen hundred years. Only comparatively recently, through archeology, has this become clear. Much the same is true of the Inca capital of Cuzco, in the central highlands of Peru. This city, with its spectacular stone masonry and megalithic architecture, was the product of a long period which saw the growth of major urban centers in other places and times. Cities and civilization V. Gordon Childe's concept of "the urban revolution" greatly influenced prehistorians and others concerned with the rise of cities and civilization, both in the Near East and in other parts of the world. Childe's formulation centered on the social and cultural transformations wrought by the urban revolution in the Near East, and he wrote of "the urban revolution" and "the birth of civilization" as though they were aspects of the same phenomenon. And indeed, the development of the city and the development of civilization appear to have been closely linked in ancient Mesopotamia. But the same does not seem to be true for the New World, or at least not for Middle America, where civilization appears to have arisen in a nonurban setting hundreds of years before the development of cities. In Peru the evidence is less clear. The concepts "civilization" and "city" cannot easily be delineated in preindustrial settings. Attempts to utilize minimal criteria, such as those suggested by Childe, in a pigeonholing operation in which cities are separated from towns, the civilized from the noncivilized, are Procrustean and self-defeating, for they lead to meaningless arguments which obscure the points at issue.
208
URBAN REVOLUTION: The New World
"Civilizations" and "cities" are conceptually distinct and should not be confused. "Civilization" refers to qualities pervading a whole society or several societies (see, for example, Redfield 1962, pp. 364-414). A preindustrial "city," on the other hand, is a concrete entity, a densely settled community, with a relatively large, concentrated, essentially permanent population. A city has many of the qualities of a civilization. For example, the social structure of a city is markedly stratified, the occupational hierarchy is highly differentiated, and the political structure is that of a state. By various means, a city's elite tends to exercise control over a significant portion of the society's labor and production of goods and services. Integration is at least partly fostered through a state ideology and a ritual system which reaffirm the basic unity of the society and its shared sacred representations, and often provide sanctioned role models for the society's different strata. "City" and "civilization" thus share some characteristics, do not share others, and are not necessarily conterminous. There may be "civilizations" without "cities," "cities" without "civilization." "Civilizations without cities" seem to have existed in parts of Middle America and Peru, in Egypt, and in other parts of the world; "cities without civilization," in parts of aboriginal west Africa and perhaps in parts of pre-Shang China and Peru. For some purposes, the two concepts, together with the "ceremonial" or "temple center" concept discussed below, may be subsumed under the rubric "complex society." But this would not be helpful here, for it would tend to blur the very differences which seem to have had important social concomitants in New World civilizations. Cities and temple centers Students of New World civilizations have argued over the significance of the roles played by ceremonial or temple centers and cities in the growth of civilizations in Middle America and Peru. It is clear that both types of settlements have long histories. Studies of settlement patterns (e.g., Willey 1956) shifted attention to the possible relation of ecological setting to the growth of cities or temple centers. Drawing an analogy from ancient Mesopotamia, earlier archeologists assumed that urban civilizations must have preceded the growth of civilizations around temple centers. For example, the ancient Maya of the tropical lowland forests of Guatemala and environs possessed a flourishing civilization built around such temple centers during the first millennium A.D. But it has been held that Maya civilization could not have originated in such
an ecological setting and thus it must have been "imported" from elsewhere. This argument has been undercut by evidence not only for a long period of indigenous growth of civilization in the Maya area itself (W. Coe 1965) but, significantly, for the growth of Olmec civilization, in an ecological setting at least as forbidding. The Olmec civilization, now thought to be the earliest civilization in Middle America, appears to have developed primarily in the lowland tropical forests of the northern part of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. (For discussion of this point see Covarrubias 1957, pp. 40-83; Drucker et al. 1959; Jimenez Moreno 1966, pp. 7-36; articles by Stirling and M. Coe in Handbook of Middle American Indians 1965, vol. 3, pp. 679-700, 716-775.) Here a number of temple centers were built, the most noted of which is at La Venta, an island in the midst of a swamp. At La Venta a great pyramid temple (of earth) and other platform structures were built; one of the world's great art styles flourished; great basalt columns and other monoliths were brought from sources scores of miles distant; monumental stone heads, altars, bas-reliefs, and other stone sculptures abounded; and figurines and a variety of objects made of jade or other green stone were used in religious offerings. Available evidence suggests that Olmec civilization flowered in the first millennium B.C. for some hundreds of years (the most frequently cited figure is 800-400 B.C.; an earlier, highly developed phase may have begun in the late second millennium— see M. Coe et al. 1967). Olmec civilization apparently was not confined to the tropical lowlands; centers of varying size and importance have been found in the highlands of central Mexico and in lower areas bordering on them, and in highland areas of southern Mexico and neighboring parts of Central America. However, none of these centers seems to have had an urban character; all were apparently temple or shrine centers of varying size, importance, and complexity. On the basis of present evidence, it thus appears that in Middle America the temple center was the first center of civilization and that it preceded the appearance of cities. The same would appear to be true of the central Andes region. The beginnings of civilization in the central Andes are associated with the center and style of Chavin, which may have flourished at approximately the same time as the Olmec. The site of Chavin itself, in the Mosna Valley, ten thousand feet above sea level in the northern highlands of Peru, has usually been described as a ceremonial center (Bennett & Bird [1949] 1964, pp. 91-102; Collier 1962, p. 169; however, see also Rowe 1963,
URBAN REVOLUTION: The New World p. 10). On the basis of existing accounts it is difficult to judge the density of settlement around Chavin's imposing ceremonial buildings, portals, courts, and galleries. Rowe summarizes evidence suggesting that some of the important large sites known to be contemporary with Chavin, and perhaps some that are considerably earlier, may have been cities (ibid., pp. 5—10; the interpretation of this evidence varies, since there are conflicting ideas on what constitutes an urban settlement). In addition, subsequent work has established that a number of temple centers of various sizes existed both on the coast and in the highlands prior to the Chavin florescence. While there is evidence that cities became increasingly important in Middle America, the evidence from the central Andes as a whole is not quite so clear (compare Bennett & Bird [1949] 1964; Collier 1962; and Schaedel 1966 with Rowe 1963, pp. 18-20). The earliest great urban center now known to have developed in Middle America was Teotihuacan. Its ruins lie in the Valley of Mexico, high in the Mexican central plateau, a little over 25 miles northeast of the site of Tenochtitlan, the later capital city of the Aztecs, and some fifty miles southwest of the site of Tula, capital of the Toltecs, the successors of the Teotihuacanos and predecessors of the Aztecs. Civilization in Middle America did not begin at Teotihuacan, site of the mammoth pyramids of the Sun and Moon, but civilized urban life of extraordinary complexity seems to have flourished there during the first millennium A.D. (Sanders [1956] 1964, pp. 123-125; Covarrubias 1957, pp. 122-143; Armillas 1964, pp. 304-310; Willey 1966, pp. 109-116; Jimenez Moreno 1966, pp. 36-56). At Teotihuacan a case can be made for an "urban revolution" comparable to the economic, social, and cultural transformations in Mesopotamia that gave rise to Sumerian civilization (Adams 1966, pp. 130-133, 172-173). At its peak of development the city covered an area of seven to eight square miles. Its population is difficult to estimate; perhaps it was about 75,000. Does Teotihuacan have more in common with the early cities of Mesopotamia and China than it does with the culturally closely related ceremonial centers of Maya civilization, such as Tikal in the tropical lowlands of Guatemala? What were the structural consequences of life in such a crowded, planned urban center as Teotihuacan? It was a city of overpowering, monumental architecture, with scores of temples, large plazas, crowded residential areas, spacious palaces, hundreds of mural paintings, and a forceful art style expressed in many media. It was
209
a metropolis and sacred center of great complexity. The many and diverse activities, interests, and beliefs of its populace, the myriad outsiders attracted to its temples, shrines, and markets—all must have contributed to making Teotihuacan a center of extraordinary cultural richness. Was life in Teotihuacan so different from life in the contemporary center of Tikal, largest of the lowland Guatemalan Maya temple centers? Tikal was the locus of a brilliant architectural and artistic florescence beginning before the Christian era and ending a thousand years later. Its towering temples were the highest ever built by the Maya. Its carvings in stone, wood, and other materials and its paintings on walls and on pottery vessels include artistic masterpieces of the highest quality. Calendrical and other inscriptions in Maya hieroglyphic writing are abundant. Tikal appears to have been as large as Teotihuacan but seems to have been much less densely settled. A minimal population of ten thousand recently has been suggested for the great Maya center. William R. Coe has argued that it was more than a ceremonial center, that its social structure was urban, even though it may not have looked like a city (1965, pp. 50-52). The point is not what Tikal should be called— macrotemple center, city, or something else. It is whether there were important structural differences between the societies of Teotihuacan and Tikal which are related to the differences in population densities and sizes and the differing social composition of the two. The exploration and delineation of these differences, if they exist, and their social and cultural concomitants, represent the real point at issue. Its resolution might have implications which would carry beyond the borders of Middle America to Peru or to the Old World. Unfortunately, detailed and comprehensive maps of the great urban and temple centers of the central Andes comparable to those of Tikal and Teotihuacan have yet to be made. For example, the great Chimu capital of Chan Chan in the Moche Valley on the north coast of Peru requires such detailed study (Kosok 1965). Writing and civilization The question of the relation of writing to the development of a peasantry (and, by implication, to the development of civilization) has been raised by Fallers (1961), in connection with some of the "complex polities" of sub-Saharan Africa. He suggested that the development of great cultural gaps between an elite and the cultivators of the soil was impeded in these societies by the absence of literary religious traditions. The development of such cultural gaps, Fallers argued, is a result of the exist-
2 10
URBAN REVOLUTION: The New World
ence of writing, which facilitates the accumulation and elaboration of religious traditions and creates a social barrier between the literate and the illiterate segments of the population. Writing never developed in the central Andes, so far as we know, although the use of the quipu (a counting device made of colored strings) as a mnemonic device undoubtedly facilitated record-keeping and the retention of many other kinds of information—historical, mythological, and religious. The juxtaposition of Fallers' argument and the evidence from Peru illuminates both. Little understanding would be gained by insisting that writing is an indispensable criterion for civilization, thereby excluding the aboriginal central Andes. At the same time, our understanding of Inca society and of the nature of Inca civilization might be advanced by explicitly examining the nature of the limitations imposed on social and cultural differentiation by the absence of writing (see Rowe 1946; Murra 1965; 1967). The result might have "feedback" for the understanding of the societies examined by Fallers. For example, it can be argued that it is not only the absence of writing that is relevant to the differences examined by Fallers. The study of New World civilizations It is axiomatic that theoretical approaches must be rooted firmly in specific bodies of empirical data and that creative interplay between the two is the major impetus to guided exploration and informed interpretation. -That this is not always what happens in practice should surprise no one. One of the most widely employed approaches to the study of New World civilizations is the "ecological," which owes much to the work of Julian H. Steward (1955a). This approach directs attention to how the members of a given society are related to their environment—particularly to how they exploit it and to the network of social relations involved—in an effort to determine in what ways these relations illumine other aspects of their social system. The immediate antecedents of this approach may be found in papers by Pedro Armillas, Wendell C. Bennett, A. L. Kroeber, Julian H. Steward, William Duncan Strong, and Gordon R. Willey (see Bennett 1948). These papers were manifestations of a growing concern among anthropologists after World War n with comparative developmental problems in the analysis of New World civilizations. Settlement pattern data have been fruitfully used in conjunction with and as part of the process of examining ecological relations (Willey 1956). The ecological approach has been as much concerned with processes of change as with the examination
of ecological relations at a moment of time (Sanders 1956). The possible relation of irrigation to the development of centralized authority in the rise of civilization has been of interest in recent years (Wittfogel 1957). Because irrigation was a necessity for intensive cultivation in coastal Peru and was widespread in Middle America when the Spanish arrived, and because irrigation agriculture is so highly productive, it has been the subject of much attention in New World studies. At the same time, it has been clear that Middle American and Peruvian irrigation systems were small in scale as compared with those associated with the great river valley civilizations of the Old World. It is also clear that centralization of authority sometimes preceded the development of unified irrigation systems, rather than the reverse (Symposium on Urbanization . . . 1960, pp. 35-43, 269-295; Adams 1966, pp. 66-67; Braidwood & Willey 1962, pp. 357-358). Because most irrigation systems in Middle America and Peru were so small, there is no need to postulate the existence of centralized political systems to manage them effectively. The role of religion in the origin and growth of New World civilizations has become a subject of increasing concern. Willey (1962) has argued that the Olmec and Chavin art styles may be symbolic expressions of ecumenical religions. The term "ecumenical," however, may be too strong in New World contexts. A safer phrase might be "a religion with ecumenical pretensions." This designation could be applied to the religion of the Inca, for example. Certainly, religion appears to have been an overriding concern of Middle American peoples from at least the beginnings of Olmec civilization. The same seems to be at least partially true of the ancient Peruvians. For example, intense religiosity seems to have permeated the Teotihuacan way of life. The enormous influence of Teotihuacan throughout so much of Middle America may have been due in considerable part to the power and emotional impact of its religious concepts and rituals and to the meaning of its sacred imagery to those who came under its spell. Despite the trend in Teotihuacan's history from traditional domination by priests to increasing secularization and increasing differentiation of the religious and the military, possibly eventuating in a shift in power from the former to the latter, the "Teotihuacan way" seems to have been suffused with the religious up to the time of the city's fall. Most of the other civilized peoples of Middle America also appear to have been dominated by a kind of religiosity that does not seem to have been present among early Chinese city
URBAN REVOLUTION: The New World dwellers, for example. Exploration of the nature of this religiosity and its social concomitants undoubtedly will continue to be of major concern in Middle American studies (see Thompson 1954; Caso 1953a; Jimenez Moreno 1966). Another approach to social cohesion and cultural integration in ancient Middle American centers of civilization has been stressed by Eric Wolf (1959, pp. 17-18, 82-83) and Steward (1955b, pp. 6165, 69-70). This is the possible significance of the sacred center which at the same time developed into a great market center. The interplay of temple and market could support a population of great diversity and ever-increasing complexity and could provide a ruling hierarchy with means for increasing its power. While the age of the temple-market place complex in Middle America is not known, it was so highly developed when the Spaniards arrived that it seems likely to have been long established. Although market place trade and the institutions surrounding it do not seem to have been as highly developed in the central Andes, they did exist and may also have played an important integrating role. In his recent comparison of the growth of urban society in ancient Mesopotamia and pre-Hispanic central Mexico, Adams concluded that "we can identify intelligible, cumulative patterns of change that were strikingly similar" (1966, p. 172). In reviewing the differences between developments in the two areas, culminating in Sargon's Akkadian kingdom and the domain of the Aztecs of Tenochtitlan, he stated: "What seems overwhelmingly most important about these differences is how small they bulk, even in aggregate, when considered against the mass of similarities in form and process. In short, the parallels . . . suggest that both instances are most significantly characterized by a common core of regularly occurring features" (ibid., pp. 174-175). Relations between Middle America and Peru A recurrent problem concerns the possible relations between civilizations in the central Andes and those in Middle America. Arguing largely from an analysis of art style, Willey has recently suggested that Olmec civilization may have been spread widely in Middle America on the crest of an "ecumenical" religion. Similarly, he has suggested that the Chavin art style, associated with the beginnings of civilization in Peru, may be an expression of another "ecumenical" religion in that region, and that Chavin religion may include Olmec concepts which spread to Peru (Willey 1962). In part, his argument grows out of the pervasiveness of the art
2 11
styles in the two areas and out of the conviction that both represent primarily religious expressions. The two styles, Olmec and Chavin, are acknowledged to be quite different, and Willey does not base his case for a connection between the two areas on stylistic relationships. Chavin art is manifested in monumental stone sculptures of great power. It shows mastery in small carvings in stone, bone, and shell, in repousse gold objects, and in modeled and incised pottery (Rowe 1962). Felines and feline and serpent elements on other beings—humans, birds, caymans— form much of its subject matter. Chavin art is widespread in Peru; but its most important centers, in terms of both art and architecture, have been found in northern Peru, in the highlands, where Chavin itself is located, and on the desert coast. The Chavin style may have flourished at approximately the same time as that of the Olmec, in the middle centuries of the first millennium B.C., perhaps beginning a bit later and continuing somewhat longer (700-200 B.C.; see Rowe 1962; Menzel et al. 1964). However, it is also possible that it began late in the second millennium B.C. Willey's argument is stimulating, but many problems remain to be solved before any conclusion can be reached (see also Kidder 1964, pp. 459-463; Lathrap 1966, pp. 271-273). Whatever the influence of Middle American religious conceptions on the rise of civilization in Peru, there is evidence that peoples of the New World's two centers of civilization were intermittently in contact for considerably more than two millennia. Contacts between them were mediated and perhaps in some cases initiated by peoples living in the "intermediate" area, and contacts may also have been made directly by sea (Willey 1955; Braidwood & Willey 1962; Meggers 1964; Meggers et al. 1965; Evans & Meggers 1966; Lathrap 1966). Certain "configurational parallels in the rise of Middle American and Peruvian civilizations" which Willey saw as "not only similar but synchronous" led him to conclude that there was "a powerful argument for historical interrelatedness" (1955, pp. 586, 588). The case for interrelatedness exists on a number of levels (Lathrap 1966, p. 275). However, this "interrelatedness" need not have had the same consequences for social structure that it may have had in a variety of other, often peripheral, contexts. Whether the social and political parallels or the parallels in settlement patterns and ecological relations which existed at various times were sufficiently close either in form and content or in time and process to attribute them to this "interrelatedness" still remains to be determined.
212
URBAN REVOLUTION: The New World
Middle America and the central Andes compared The ancient civilizations of Middle America and the central Andes resembled each other in many ways. Both arose in settings of spectacular topographic and environmental diversity in tropical zones. Because great mountain chains run through Middle America and the central Andes, major zones of temperate and colder climates are found in both. The climatic and topographic barriers in Middle America and the central Andes served in varying degrees, depending on the area and the time, both to separate and to unite zones having dramatically different environments (Sanders 1956; Wolf 1959, pp. 17-18). Sharp topographical variations mean that different environmental zones may be physically quite close to each other, providing a possible basis for the exchange of distinctive products of each. This potentiality seems to have been exploited more fully in Middle America than in Peru, through institutionalized networks of market place and long-distance trade. In both Middle America and the central Andes there were a number of centers of civilization. Monumental architecture, often in the form of pyramid temples—sometimes in stone, sometimes of earth and/or adobe faced with stone, sometimes of earth or adobe—was widespread in both regions. As we have seen, both the temple center and the city were found in each area. In both areas civilizations rose and fell, in many cases to be supplanted by new civilizations. But in some cases, such as the Maya of the southern lowlands of Guatemala and their environs, the collapse was final and partial depopulation followed (about A.D. 900). Distinctive practices in Middle America included widespread networks of market place trade, often associated with temples or shrines; elaboration of calendrical systems, including a solar calendar of 360 days plus five nameless days, and a ritual calendar of 260 days; use of a vigesimal system of numerical notation; hieroglyphic writing (most highly developed by the Maya); the cultivation of chinampas, a labor-intensive system of garden cultivation in the shallow lakes of the Valley of Mexico; the working of jade and the value placed on it as the most precious of all substances; the widespread use of lime cement and lime plaster in construction; the ritual use of miniature wheeled animals of clay (but, so far as we know, no practical use of the wheel); and a game of ritual character played with a rubber ball on distinctively constructed courts in which vertically positioned rings of stone were often fixed (Kirchhoff 1943).
Distinctive practices in Peru included the domestication of the llama and the alpaca and the use of the llama as a draft animal (no draft animals were used in Middle America); the development of elaborate systems of roads, the most notable being that of the Inca; the great development of metallurgy, the use of alloys of gold, silver, copper, tin, and platinum, and specialized casting techniques (knowledge of certain metallurgical techniques, including the "lost-wax" method, seems to have spread relatively late to Middle America— toward the end of the first millennium A.D.—from neighboring regions of Central America or perhaps from further south); the use of the quipu and the decimal system; and shrines of great prestige where oracles were widely consulted (sometimes important pilgrimage centers, such as Pachacamac, on the central coast of Peru, had branch oracles in faraway places). The cultivation of plants for food and other uses began in several regions of Middle America in the seventh or sixth millennium B.C. or earlier. Among the early domesticates was maize, the New World's most important cereal plant. In Peru a variety of plants other than maize was being cultivated in the fourth and third millennia B.C. Maize cultivation does not appear to have reached Peru until toward the end of the second millennium B.C. If we compare the two regions in terms of political development at the time of the Spanish conquest, it is clear that the empire of the Inca was larger, more complex, more effectively administered, and more secure than that of the Aztecs. Howe argues that the Inca, during their relatively brief rule, had built a nation by the time the Spanish arrived ([1946] 1963, pp. 329-330). The same cannot be said for the Aztecs. Before the rise of Olmec and Chavin civilizations, there was a period in both Middle America and Peru during which settled farming communities of the village type grew larger and more numerous and precursors of the great pyramids and temples of the two regions were built. In both regions the beginnings of this period extend well back into the second millennium B.C. Currently available evidence may indicate that some settlements in Peru at this time were larger and more populous and had larger temples than was the case in Middle America (for example, Las Haldas, on the north-central desert coast, and Kotosh in the north highlands; Rowe 1963; Tokyo Daigaku . . . 1960-1963). Ceremonial structures of impressive size may even date from the third millennium B.C. on the central coast of Peru. The Olmec and Chavin civilizations may have flourished at the same time, but in spectacularly
URBAN REVOLUTION: The New World different ecological settings—Chavin in the temperate highlands and on the desert coast, Olmec primarily in the tropical forests of the coastal lowlands but also in the subtropical to temperate highlands. The institutional settings in which each arose are obscure and not now subject to comparison except in the most general terms. In Middle America, following the decline of Olmec influence, and in some cases arising before that decline, the great regional civilizations developed. These include the ancient Maya (see Handbook . . . 1965, vols. 2 and 3; M. Coe 1966); the people of the dramatic mountain top center of Monte Alban in the Oaxaca highlands, who (rather than the Olmec) may have been the first to use the bar-and-dot system of numeral notation for calendrical purposes, a system later adopted by others and greatly elaborated by the Maya (see articles by Caso, Acosta, and Bernal in Handbook . . . 1965, vol. 3; Paddock 1966); the peoples of lowland Veracruz—of Remojadas, Tres Zapotes, and Tajin; the people who built the great city of Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico; the closely related people of Cholula in the adjacent Valley of Puebla, who built the New World's largest pyramid and who continued to flourish long after the fall of Teotihuacan; and the peoples of the southern highlands, including those who built Kaminaljuya in the Valley of Guatemala. There was an early florescence of Maya art, hieroglyphic writing, and calendrical reckoning at Kaminaljuya, but later this center was conquered by or came under strong influence from Teotihuacan (Handbook . . . 1965, vol. 2). These civilizations, while beginning at various times in the first millennium B.C., appear to have existed through a major part of the first millennium A.D. (Caso 1953&; Jimenez Moreno 1966; Willey 1966, pp. 78-152); some, like Cholula, were still important centers when the Spanish arrived. In the central Andes this was also a time of regional diversity. The gifted Moche people were thriving on the north coast of Peru, where they raised monumental pyramids of adobe, put powerful armies into the field, built a small empire, and created a vivid, sophisticated art. Moche art is known to us principally in ceramics that apparently portrayed everything in Moche life, from the most sacred to the most mundane; it ranged from the most esoteric symbols to the most explicitly sexual representations (Larco Hoyle [1946] 1963, pp. 161-175). On the south coast of Peru at approximately the same time, the complex Nasca polychrome style was flourishing in a number of centers. Pachacamac and Cajamarquilla were important centers on the central coast. Tiahuanaco, in the highlands of northern Bolivia, may already
213
have been an important center, although it apparently did not reach maturity until the succeeding period, when most of its monumental architecture seems to have been built. In the central highlands, the great site of Huari, probable capital of a loosely organized empire stretching over much of Peru in the succeeding period, was already an impressive center (Rowe 1963, p. 12; Menzel 1964, p. 66). The succeeding period in the central Andes was a time of empire, or at any rate of military expansion, however transitory may have been the political units created. The capital of this expansive movement appears to have been the city of Huari, the religious inspiration for its cult perhaps stemming from the austere center of Tiahuanaco (Menzel 1964; Kidder 1964, pp. 468-470, 482483). Certainly, important elements of the Huari art style stem from Tiahuanaco, whatever may have been the relation between these two centers. The spread of Huari seems to have occurred toward the end of the first millennium A.D. and may have involved the building of cities and monumental constructions in other parts of Peru. Tiahuanaco itself is a center of great size, with monumental architecture including megalithic constructions, monolithic gateways, superb stone masonry, and a powerful art style known to us primarily from stone carvings and polychrome ceramics featuring human figures, pumas, and birds. In Middle America the period roughly corresponding in time to the Huari expansion is the period of Toltec expansionism. Tula, the capital of the Toltecs, just north of the Valley of Mexico, was the site of majestic temples with colonnades, serpent columns, colossal warrior atlantes, lowrelief carvings of prowling jaguars and coyotes, and painted friezes of serpents and warriors. Toltec expansion reached as far east as Chichen Itza in northeastern Yucatan (see Armillas 1964, pp. 314317). It seems almost certain that Toltec expansionism took the form of conquest; yet if we compare the influence of the Toltecs in Middle America with that of the Tiahuanaco-inspired Huari expansion, the influence of Huari seems more pervasive. To find in Middle America something approaching a parallel of Huari's influence, we must turn to the great city of Teotihuacan. Toward the middle of the first millennium A.D. large parts of Middle America came under the influence, if not the control, of Teotihuacan. This influence did not take the same form as that of Huari, in that conquest may not have been the principal means of expansion. In any event, the people of Teotihuacan influenced a wider area for a longer time than did the Toltecs, who succeeded them. So far as is known, the first gigantic city to de-
21 4
URBAN REVOLUTION: The New World
velop in Peru was associated with the post-Huari Chimii empire on the north coast. The Chimu capital, Chan Chan, covered an immense area; its planned rectangular layout, rows of rooms grouped about courts, pyramids, arabesque-decorated clay surfaces, and giant adobe wall compounds form one of the most impressive achievements of central Andean civilization (Kosok 1965, pp. 70-96; Schaedel 1966, p. 534). But it remains to be established whether even Chan Chan, before its conquest by the Inca of Cuzco, was as highly developed an urban center as Teotihuacan. For that matter, Cuzco itself does not seem to have been an urban center in the same sense as was the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan (Rowe 1963, pp. 17-18). In sum, there appear to be a number of parallels of a relatively general nature among the processes of change distinguishable in the growth of the aboriginal civilizations of Middle America and the central Andes. Among these are parallels in social institutions, in religious and political structures, in urbanization, and in trends toward secularization and increasing differentiation of the religious and the military. These parallels frequently are not close temporally, and they may occur in significantly different structural and ecological contexts. Adequate analyses of most of these parallels and the contexts in which they occur remain to be carried out. Chronology Absolute chronology in Middle America is based on several lines of evidence: (1) the archeological sequence in the Maya lowlands, where calendrical inscriptions have been variously correlated with the Christian calendar (the correlation used is the Goodman-Martinez-Thompson correlation, usually designated the GMT correlation); such Maya "Initial Series" inscriptions roughly span the period from A.D. 300 to 900, using the GMT correlation; (2) the extension of this chronology to other regions of Middle American civilization, either directly, by cross-dating, or indirectly, through the relations of the Maya with Teotihuacan and the relations of Teotihuacan with other regions (this provides at best a loose framework of cross-dating for A.D. 300-900); (3) relating regional sequences to each other by cross-dating at other periods of time, either before or after A.D. 300-900; and (4) absolute dates provided by radiocarbon determinations. The last, while of great value, provide no ready solutions, for they are frequently difficult to interpret and sometimes appear to contradict each other. In Peru much the same procedure has been fol-
lowed, with the important exception that in Peru there is no indigenous system of absolute dating to serve as a reference point. The result is that absolute chronology in the central Andes rests largely on the use of cross-dating of regional sequences of relative chronology and on radiocarbon dating (Rowe 1963). Existing systems of chronological periodization in Middle America and the central Andes are so confusing that they are often self-defeating, because in most of them time periods are confused with developmental "stages." (For discussion of this point see Willey et al. 1964, pp. 477-478; Rowe [1963, pp. 1-2] employs a purely chronological classification, but it is not in general use.) Middle American and Peruvian prehistory can be divided roughly into three great time periods following the full establishment of settled village cultivation: (1) an early period of more than a thousand years during which village life became transformed in some areas by the initial rise of civilization; (2) a middle period, covering most of the first millennium A.D., in which a number of distinct regional civilizations flourished and some perished; and (3) the centuries immediately preceding and including the Spanish conquest of the Aztec and Inca states in the sixteenth century. In Middle America, Olmec civilization would fall in the early period. Teotihuacan would stretch across the latter part of the early period and most of the middle period; the same is true of the ancient Maya of the Guatemala lowlands, except that Maya centers seem to have started earlier and lasted longer. The Toltec expansion would fall in the late period but would begin in the middle period. In Peru, Chavin would fall in the early period, and Moche and Nasca would span the latter part of the early period and the early part of the middle period. The Tiahuanaco-related Huari expansion would span the end of the middle and the beginning of the late period. The most common designations for these three periods are Preclassic (or "formative"), Classic, and Postclassic. The problem with the use of these designations lies in the developmental connotations of terms such as "classic." Learned arguments over whether a given ancient society is "developed enough" to "belong" in the "classic," or whether it "belongs" in the "protoclassic" or something equally contradictory, such as "formative," are sterile. A classification system that is purely chronological can more readily facilitate the making of comparisons if it does not of itself prejudge the comparisons—implicitly or explicitly, intentionally or inadvertently—by clothing chronology in develop-
URBAN REVOLUTION: The New World mental terminology. Analysis of developmental problems is not thereby facilitated; it, too, becomes muddled in extraneous issues. Developmental and chronological systems should be separate and distinct. Possible influences of Old World civilizations Speculations on the possible Old World origins of New World civilizations began almost as soon as the Spanish conquerors had consolidated their hold on the peoples of these native civilizations. Such speculations have continued to the present day, sometimes with and sometimes without critical examination of the evidence. The problem here is to sort evidence which may bear on the rise of civilization and cities from evidence which may support earlier or later contacts (Heine-Geldern 1966; Meggers et al. 1965; Tolstoy 1966). Gordon Ekholm recently rephrased the perennial question as follows: "The question of transpacific contacts . . . , whether or not the civilizations of the Old World significantly influenced the origin and development of those in the New World, . . . has . . . significant . . . implications [for] theoretical considerations . . . of the factors involved in the growth of civilizations" (1964, p. 489). Some measure of influence from Asia may be present in the civilizations of the New World, but to date none of fundamental significance has been demonstrated. It has been argued that parallels are to be found between the emphasis and mode of representation of the feline in the art of Shang China (late second millennium B.C.) and in Chavin and Olmec art. The great interest in jade and the consummate skill with which it was worked by artisans in Shang and Chou China and in Olmec Middle America may be significant (ibid., pp. 503504). Nevertheless, as Ekholm admits, "no one has very seriously suggested an Asiatic origin for some of the major elements in the Olmec complex" (ibid.}. The possibility that Old World peoples significantly influenced New World civilization cannot be dismissed, and investigators should continue to search for supporting evidence (Caso 1962; Tolstoy 1966). At the same time, the reader should bear in mind that at this writing, available evidence indicates that New World civilizations arose independently, without any decisive influences from Old World centers (Phillips 1966; Willey 1966, pp. 21-25). Prospects Future studies of early civilizations in the New World can be expected to make contributions to
2 15
the social sciences in two related areas: (1) in achieving greater understanding of the distinctive qualities of nonindustrial urban societies in their ecological settings, through studies of ancient urban centers and through systematic comparisons of such centers with other complex settlements in their respective settings; (2) in achieving far greater understanding of processes of growth of urban and other complex settlements in nonindustrial settings through comparisons both of New World civilizations and of early civilizations and later nonindustrial civilizations in the Old World. In both of these areas it is reasonable to anticipate that increasing use will be made of the findings of social anthropology, comparative sociology, and the sociology of religion, in particular as these bear on such matters as corporate groupings and their functions, the strengths and limits of ecological interpretations, structural and other relationships directly related to cohesion and integration, the polities of nonindustrial civilizations, and the relation of differing religious forms and belief systems to problems of motivation, integration, growth, stability, and change. In turn, modification of some of these findings may occur—as, for example, in the simple conceptual distinction between "civilization" and "city"—when placed in the context of New World evidence. Where few or no historical data exist and where archeological evidence alone is involved, limitations on inferences naturally will be immensely greater. Clearer and more precise specification of social, cultural, and other differences between great urban centers such as Teotihuacan and Tenochtitlan, on the one hand, and great temple centers such as Tikal, on the other, may be achieved through techniques of computer analysis, for such techniques greatly facilitate the juxtaposition and comparison of many variables. When more is known about Chan Chan, it should be possible to compare it substantively with Teotihuacan, Tenochtitlan, and other Middle American centers and thus arrive at a clearer conception of the concomitants of urbanism in Peru. Perhaps similar clarification of the nature of urbanism at Cuzco may be expected. A most important development which might greatly facilitate comparisons would be major progress in the deciphering of Maya hieroglyphic writing, particularly since the recent work of Tatiana Proskouriakoff has shown it probable that many Maya inscriptions relate to "political" history (Thompson 1965, pp. 635-636), Similarly, greater understanding of the processes of urban growth may be expected to derive from more precise comparisons between the societies of
21 6
URBAN REVOLUTION: The New World
the Aztec and the Inca, between the growth of civilizations in the Valley of Mexico and in the coastal areas of Peru, and between New World centers and such Old World centers as early north China. Current investigations, principally by anthropologists, utilizing sophisticated methods to explore a wealth of unpublished documentary sources, many of them of a legal nature, on the Aztec, the Inca, and some of their contemporaries, should yield important new data and interpretations. Existing evidence of independent recurrences of a social, cultural, and processual nature suggests that a growing number of structural and developmental regularities will be found in future comparative studies. REN£ MILLON [See also ARCHEOLOGY, article on THE FIELD; ECOLOGY, article on CULTURAL ECOLOGY; EVOLUTION, article on CULTURAL EVOLUTION. Other relevant material may be found in DIFFUSION; MIDDLE AMERICAN SOCIETY.] BIBLIOGRAPHY ADAMS, ROBERT McC. 1966 The Evolution of Urban Society: Early Mesopotamia and Prehispanic Mexico. Chicago: Aldine. ARMILLAS, PEDRO 1964 Northern Mesoamerica. Pages 291-329 in William Marsh Rice University, Houston, Texas, Prehistoric Man in the New World. Edited by Jesse D. Jennings and Edward Norbeck. Univ. of Chicago Press. BENNETT, WENDELL C. (compiler) 1948 A Reappraisal of Peruvian Archaeology. Society for American Archaeology, Memoir No. 4. Menasha, Wis.: The Society. BENNETT, WENDELL C.; and BIRD, JUNIUS B. (1949) 1964 Andean Culture History. 2d ed., rev. American Museum of Natural History Handbook Series, No. 15. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. -> A paperback edition was published in 1964. BERNAL, IGNACIO (compiler) 1962 Bibliografia de arqueologia y etnografia: Mesoamerica y norte de Mexico, 1514-1960. Mexico City: Institute Nacional de Antropologia e Historia. BRAIDWOOD, ROBERT J.; and WILLEY, GORDON R. (editors) 1962 Courses Toward Urban Life: Archeological Considerations of Some Cultural Alternates. Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology, No. 32. Chicago: Aldine. -> The contents of this volume result from a symposium held at the European headquarters of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research in Austria, July 3-11, 1960. CASO, ALFONSO (1953a) 1958 The Aztecs: People of the Sun. Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press. -» First published as El pueblo del sol. CASO, ALFONSO 1953& New World Culture History: Middle America. Pages 226-237 in International Symposium on Anthropology, New York, 1952, Anthropology Today: An Encyclopedic Inventory. Univ. of Chicago Press. CASO, ALFONSO (1962)1964 Relations Between the Old and New Worlds: A Note on Methodology. Volume 1, pages 55-71 in International Congress of Americanists, 35th, Mexico, 1962, Adas y memorias. Mexico,
D. F.: Institute Nacional de Antropologia e Historia. -> First published in Spanish in Volume 21 of Cuadernos americanos. COE, MICHAEL D. 1966 The Maya. New York: Praeger. COE, MICHAEL D. et al. 1967 Olmec Civilization, Veracruz, Mexico: Dating of the San Lorenzo Phase. Science 155:1399-1401. COE, WILLIAM R. 1965 Tikal: Ten Years of Study of a Maya Ruin in the Lowlands of Guatemala. Expedition: Bulletin of the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania 8, no. 1:5-56. COLLIER, D. 1962 The Central Andes. Pages 165-176 in Robert J. Braidwood and Gordon R. Willey (editors), Courses Toward Urban Life: Archeological Considerations of Some Cultural Alternates. Chicago: Aldine. COVARRUBIAS, MIGUEL 1957 The Indian Art of Mexico and Central America. New York: Knopf. DRUCKER, PHILIP; HEIZER, ROBERT F.; and SQUIER, ROBERT J. 1959 Excavations at La Venta, Tabasco, 1955. U.S. Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin No. 170. Washington: Government Printing Office. EKHOLM, GORDON F. 1964 Transpacific Contacts. Pages 489-510 in William Marsh Rice University, Houston, Texas, Prehistoric Man in the New World. Edited by Jesse D. Jennings and Edward Norbeck. Univ. of Chicago Press. EVANS, CLIFFORD; and MEGGERS, BETTY J. 1966 Mesoamerica and Ecuador. Pages 243-264 in Handbook of Middle American Indians. Volume 4: Archaeological Frontiers and External Connections. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press. FALLERS, LLOYD A. 1961 Are African Cultivators to Be Called "Peasants"? Current Anthropology 2, no. 2: 108-110. Handbook of Middle American Indians. Edited by Robert Wauchope. Vol. 1— 1964— Austin: Univ. of Texas Press. -> Four volumes have been published to date. HEINE-GELDERN, ROBERT 1966 The Problem of Transpacific Influences in Mesoamerica. Pages 277-295 in Handbook of Middle American Indians. Volume 4: Archaeological Frontiers and External Connections. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press. JIMENEZ MORENO, WIGBERTO 1966 Mesoamerica Before the Toltecs. Pages 1-82 in John Paddock (editor), Ancient Oaxaca: Discoveries in Mexican Archeology and History. Stanford Univ. Press. KIDDER, ALFRED V. 1964 South American High Cultures. Pages 451-486 in William Marsh Rice University, Houston, Texas, Prehistoric Man in the New World. Edited by Jesse D. Jennings and Edward Norbeck. Univ. of Chicago Press. KIRCHHOFF, PAUL (1943) 1952 Mesoamerica: Its Geographic Limits, Ethnic Composition and Cultural Characteristics. Pages 17-30 in Sol Tax et al. Heritage of Conquest: The Ethnology of Middle America. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. -> First published in German in Volume 1 of Acta americana. KOSOK, PAUL 1965 Life, Land and Water in Ancient Peru. New York: Long Island Univ. LARCO HOYLE, RAFAEL (1946)1963 A Culture Sequence for the North Coast of Peru. Pages 149-175 in Julian H. Steward (editor), Handbook of South American Indians. Volume 2: The Andean Civilizations. U.S. Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin No. 143. New York: Cooper Square. LATHRAP, DONALD W. 1966 Relationships Between Mesoamerica and the Andean Areas. Pages 265-275 in
URBAN REVOLUTION: The New World Handbook of Middle American Indians. Volume 4: Archaeological Frontiers and External Connections. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press. MEGGERS, BETTY J. 1964 North and South American Cultural Connections and Convergences. Pages 511526 in William Marsh Rice University, Houston, Texas, Prehistoric Man in the New World. Edited by Jesse D. Jennings and Edward Norbeck. Univ. of Chicago Press. MEGGERS, BETTY J.; EVANS, CLIFFORD; and ESTRADA, EMILIO 1965 Early Formative Period of Coastal Ecuador: The Valdivia and Machalilla Phases. Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology, Vol. 1. Washington: Smithsonian Institution. MENZEL, DOROTHY 1964 Style and Time in the Middle Horizon. Volume 2, pages 1-105 in Nawpa Pacha: An International Series for Andean Archaeology. Berkeley, Calif.: Institute of Andean Studies. MENZEL, DOROTHY,- HOWE, JOHN H.; and DAWSON, L. 1964 The Paracas Pottery of lea: A Study in Style and Time. California, University of, Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology Vol. 50. MURRA, JOHN V. 1965 Herds and Herders in the Inca State. Pages 185-215 in American Association for the Advancement of Science, Man, Culture and Animals: The Role of Animals in Human Ecological Adjustments. Publication No. 78. Washington: The Association. MURRA, JOHN V. 1967 On Inca Political Structure. Pages 339-353 in Ronald Cohen and John Middleton (editors), Comparative Political Systems: Studies in the Politics of Pre-industrial Societies. Garden City, N.Y.: Natural History Press. Nawpa Pacha: An International Series for Andean Archaeology. Vol. 1— 1963— Berkeley, Calif.: Institute of Andean Studies. PADDOCK, JOHN (editor) 1966 Ancient Oaxaca: Discoveries in Mexican Archeology and History. Stanford Univ. Press. PHILLIPS, PHILIP 1966 The Role of Transpacific Contacts in the Development of New World Pre-Columbian Civilizations. Pages 296-315 in Handbook of Middle American Indians. Volume 4: Archaeological Frontiers and External Connections. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press. REDFIELD, ROBERT 1962 Papers. Volume 1: Human Nature and the Study of Society. Edited by Margaret Park Redfield. Univ. of Chicago Press. ROWE, JOHN H. (1946) 1963 Inca Culture at the Time of the Spanish Conquest. Pages 183-330 in Julian H. Steward (editor), Handbook of South American Indians. Volume 2: The Andean Civilizations. U.S. Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin No. 143. New York: Cooper Square. ROWE, JOHN H. 1962 Chavin Art: An Inquiry Into Its Form and Meaning. New York: Museum of Primitive Art. ROWE, JOHN H. 1963 Urban Settlements in Ancient Peru. Volume 1, pages 1-27 in Nawpa Pacha: An International Series for Andean Archaeology. Berkeley, Calif.: Institute of Andean Studies. SANDERS, WILLIAM T. (1956) 1964 The Central Mexican Symbiotic Region: A Study in Prehistoric Settlement Patterns. Pages 115-127 in Gordon R. Willey (editor), Prehistoric Settlement Patterns in the New World. Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology, No. 23. New York: Johnson Reprint.
21 7
SCHAEDEL, RICHARD P. 1966 Urban Growth and Ekistics on the Peruvian Coast. Volume 1, pages 531-539 in International Congress of Americanists, 36th, Valencia, 1964, Actas y memorias. Seville (Spain): No publisher given. SOUSTELLE, JACQUES (1955) 1961 Daily Life of the Aztecs, on the Eve of the Spanish Conquest. New York: Macmillan. -> First published as La vie quotidienne des Azteques a la veille de la conquete espagnole. STEWARD, JULIAN H. (editor) (1946) 1963 Handbook of South American Indians. Volume 2: The Andean Civilizations. U.S. Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin No. 143. New York: Cooper Square. STEWARD, JULIAN H. 1955a Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press. STEWARD, JULIAN H. (editor) 1955fe Irrigation Civilizations: A Comparative Study. Pan American Union, Social Science Monographs, No. 1. Washington: Pan American Union. SYMPOSIUM ON URBANIZATION AND CULTURJ&, DEVELOPMENT IN THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, 7958 1960 City Invincible. Edited by Carl H. Kraeling and Robert McC. Adams. Univ. of Chicago Press. THOMPSON, J. ERIC S. 1954 The Rise and Fall of Maya Civilization. Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press. THOMPSON, J. ERIC S. 1965 Maya Hieroglyphic Writing. Pages 632-658 in Handbook of Middle American Indians. Volume 3: Archaeology of Southern Mesoamerica, Part 2. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press. TOKYO DAIGAKU, ANDESU CHITAI GAKUJUTSU CHOSADAN, 1958 1960-1963 Andes: The Report of the University of Tokyo Scientific Expedition to the Andes in 1958. Vols. 1-3. Tokyo: Kadokowa. TOLSTOY, PAUL 1966 Method in Long Range Comparison. Volume 1, pages 69-89 in International Congress of Americanists, 36th, Valencia, 1964, Actas y memorias. Seville (Spain): No publisher given. WILLEY, GORDON R. 1955 The Prehistoric Civilizations of Nuclear America. American Anthropologist New Series 57:571-593. WILLEY, GORDON R. (editor) 1956 Prehistoric Settlement Patterns in the New World. Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology, No. 23. New York: WennerGren Foundation for Anthropological Research. WILLEY, GORDON R. 1962 The Early Great Styles and the Rise of the Pre-Columbian Civilizations. American Anthropologist New Series 64:1-14. WILLEY, GORDON R. 1966 An Introduction to American Archaeology. Volume 1: North and Middle America. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. WILLEY, GORDON R.; EKHOLM, GORDON F.; and MILLON, RENE F. 1964 The Patterns of Farming Life and Civilization. Pages 446-498 in Handbook of Middle American Indians. Volume 1: Natural Environment and Early Cultures. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press. WILLIAM MARSH RICE UNIVERSITY, HOUSTON, TEXAS 1964 Prehistoric Man in the New World. Edited by Jesse D. Jennings and Edward Norbeck. Univ. of Chicago Press. WITTFOGEL, KARL A. 1957 Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. -> A paperback edition was published in 1963. WOLF, ERIC R. 1959 Sons of the Shaking Earth. Univ. of Chicago Press. -> A paperback edition was published in 1962.
21 8
URBAN REVOLUTION: The Concept of Civilization HI THE CONCEPT OF CIVILIZATION
Civilization is a concept used by anthropologists in opposition to the notions of primitive and folk cultures. As a taxonomical category it applies to cultural types characterized by organic heterogeneity and correlatively complex societal structures. Civilized societies are typically stratified and segmented, and the culture of civilization is correspondingly diversified. Organic heterogeneity means functional differentiation of subcultures—high and low, hierarchic and lay, town and country—within the whole cultural fabric of a single civilization. In evolutionary terms, the achievement of civilization represents a definite stage in the development of society and culture; as such, it contrasts with savagery and barbarism, the levels of integration that preceded civilization in the course of mankind's progress. Criteria of civilization The achievement of civilization presupposes the attainment of a considerable degree of efficiency in food production; the economic foundations of civilization are everywhere based firmly on agricultural productivity. Also, technological advancement—not only techniques and crafts but, perhaps more significantly, the development of managerial skills— is functionally linked to the processes of civilization; indeed, the advent of civilization can be viewed as a revolutionary change in the relative importance in society of the moral order and the technical order (Redfield 1953, chapter 3). Nevertheless, the diagnostic criteria that serve to differentiate civilization from the stage of barbarism are social, moral, and intellectual. Techniques such as metallurgy, the improvement of transportation through the use of the wheel and the sail, the harnessing of animal power, and the increase of agricultural productivity by means of land reclamation, soil conservation, and hydraulic control are frequently associated with the growth of civilization. Despite the undeniable functional significance of these techniques, they cannot be accepted as diagnostic criteria. Many of these features are missing from the technological inventory of some pristine civilizations and are known by noncivilized peoples, although their spread among the latter can be viewed historically as the result, in most cases, of diffusion from ancient civilization. In the social sphere, all civilizations are characterized by systems of economic relations based on social division of labor, horizontal (specialization and segmentation) as well as vertical (stratification); control of the means of production
(including human labor) by ruling classes which assume the centralization and redistribution of surpluses, contributed by the primary producers as tithe or tax, and the allocation of a labor force for public works; networks of exchange, controlled by a professional merchant class or by the state, that supersede the direct exchange of goods and services; and a political structure dominated by a segment of society that centralizes executive and administrative functions. The power of the ruling classes is backed by compulsion; the state, integrated on the bases of social class and residence— instead of tribal organization, based on descent and kinship—constitutes the nucleus of the civilized polity. The rise of civilization is accompanied by radical transformations of the ethical systems that are correlated with the thorough reshaping of the social fabric mentioned above. As relations among men change, so do man's views of the universe. The moral order becomes institutionalized: a hierarchical class of priests, temples (houses of the gods), state-managed cults, and a sociomorphic conception of the supernatural world (with deities arranged in some hierarchical order which reflects the increasing complexity of the earthly social system) are the hallmarks of early civilization. Also, whatever the external form the gods may assume, they are anthropomorphically conceived in their moral qualities—they are human, and often too human, in their whims, feelings, and passions. Conversely, man becomes a creature of the gods, and society is understood as a manifestation of the cosmic harmony; thus, the new social order comes to be viewed as the product of divine sanction. Civilization effects a true "remaking of man" (Redfield 1953, p. 29). Ethical life acquires new dimensions with the rise of moral orders more inclusive than the traditional moral order of the local communities or tribal groups; ideas elaborated by an elite of literati shape the moral order. The revolutionary changes in the structure of society stimulate moral creativeness; with the growth of civilization, ideas rise as forces in history. In the realm of the intellect, civilization is marked by the development of speculative thought, the expansion of time consciousness (retrospective and prospective), the elaboration of exact and predictive sciences (arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy), the adoption of conventional symbols for recording and transmitting information (writing and numerical notation), and the fixing of standards of time and space, and eventually also of weight.
URBAN REVOLUTION: The Concept of Civilization Organically, these achievements reflect the creative activities of two new social groups of full-time specialists liberated from manual toil by the redistribution of the surpluses accumulated in temple or royal granary, or supported by the rent of corporate lands. Some of the discoveries and inventions are undoubtedly the product of the experiences of administrators and builders concerned with practical matters. However, the codification and elaboration of this knowledge and the mental exploration of abstract subjects are the work of learned men enjoying creative leisure, free to dedicate their time to reflective thought and relatively unconcerned with immediate application of the principles involved. The accurate determination of the apparent movements of the moon and the stars, especially the exact measurement of the year in tropical regions, serves the immediate purpose of improving the regulation of the cycle of agricultural operations; its practical application is in the social sphere. But watching the sky also opens men's minds to the mysteries of the cosmos; thus, speculative-minded practitioners of the craft may indulge in the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, far beyond the immediate requirements of computing periods—as attested by the ancient Maya extravagant elaboration of the philosophy of time. Also, the study of the gyrations of the celestial bodies impinges on the moral sphere, insofar as they come to be viewed as regulators of man's fate. Foretelling, no less than reckoning, satisfies expectations nurtured by civilization. The development of arithmetic is clearly related to the expansion of administration and commerce, on the one hand, and to the calendar, on the other; the rise of geometry can be linked to land measurement, which acquires paramount importance in the frame of the new economic system, and to engineering (as for hydraulic works) and monumental architecture. As for the development of writing, some system of recording becomes a requirement for the administration of increasingly complex polities and the management of large estates and trade; however, the efficient use of sets of knotted strings for census and tax reckoning in ancient Peru attests that the system used to meet these requisites does not have to be a script. But writing, in contrast with purely mnemonic devices, has revolutionary potential: it can be developed to satisfy other emerging needs. Thus, it can be applied to the formulation of complex astronomical and mathematical information; to the compilation of laws, cosmologic lore, or dynastic lists (and eventually the substance
2 19
of history); to the registration of transactions, contracts, and deeds; and even to the recording of magical incantations, a feature by no means inconsequential in early civilizations. Writing is a functionally significant criterion of civilization. Finally, the attainment of civilization produces an expansion in aesthetic consciousness. A high art (the art of the high culture) characterized by conceptualized and sophisticated styles becomes differentiated, superseding the old forms of communal art and relegating them to a subordinate level. This phenomenon clearly reflects the increasing complexity of civilized society and the development of subcultures. The intricate relationships between high art, the traditional folk art, and the derivative peasant art of the rural communities in a civilized society are not yet clearly understood. The concepts "monumentality," "naturalism," and "hieratism," generally used to characterize the specific qualities of the high art of pristine civilizations, are not precise enough and do not suffice to define it. What is significant is that the new styles are the product of the creative activities of specially trained, professional-minded artists-craftsmen who labor to meet the demands of an elite of art patrons imbued with the new spirit. With the growth of hierarchic culture as civilization develops, the high art's symbolism and language of form become prescribed and systematized by the same class that henceforth manages the moral order: the possessors of sacred and secular power embodied in the institutions of the temple and the palace. History of the concept For L. H. Morgan, whose pioneering work on the subject of cultural evolution, Ancient Society, was first published in 1877, the mark of having achieved civilization was a phonetic alphabet or, as "an equivalent," hieroglyphic writing, and the keeping of records concerning history, law, scientific knowledge, and religion. Manifestly, this criterion emphasizes moral and intellectual progress; hence, it is important to note that Morgan's thoughts on the subject encompassed a wider range. In fact, his forte was the study of social organization and, quite naturally, his most important perceptions on cultural evolution concern social systems. He stressed the significance, in the process of civilization, of the shift from the community integrated on principles of descent and affinity to the political society organized on the bases of function and residence. Also, he was well aware that all the other criteria used for the classification of evolutionary stages ought to be corre-
220
URBAN REVOLUTION: The Concept of Civilization
lated with changes in the productive forces available to society for the satisfaction of its basic needs or, in his own words, "the successive arts of subsistence"; he did not feel, however, that this task could be accomplished at that time because there were few investigations of ancient modes of production. Morgan noted the relation of plow agriculture and irrigated horticulture to the integration of large political entities; however, his views on the significance of irrigation were restricted by ignorance of the role of water control in the political systems of the oldest civilizations. [See the biography of MORGAN, LEWIS HENRY.] Karl Marx read Ancient Society in 1880-1881 and made copious notes in preparation for what might have developed into a thoroughgoing commentary on Morgan's novel ideas. Failing health, however, prevented him from doing further work on it. Soon after the death of Marx in 1883, the task was completed by Friedrich En gels. In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, first published in 1884, Engels brilliantly glossed Ancient Society in terms of the materialistic conception of history. He refined the general scheme of social evolution by defining the transition from one stage to the next with reference to the changes in economic conditions, and he sharpened the concept of civilization as a social phenomenon. Engels' dynamic model stressed the role played by the consolidation and intensification of the division of labor, the growth of a system of commodity exchange controlled by a differentiated group of merchants, the development of private landownership, the concentration and centralization of wealth (i.e., social surpluses), and the cleavage of society into classes following the dissolution of "gentile" (i.e., based on kinship) organization. With the rise of civilization, the "gentile" constitution was replaced by polities structured through the grouping of members on a territorial basis and ruled by officials possessing public power and the right of taxation. Indeed, the appearance of social classes and the state constitutes the core of Engels' view of the process of civilization. He was equally explicit about the opposition created between town and country but saw this merely as an economic phenomenon related to the whole social division of labor; he did not refer at all to the cultural aspect of the differentiation of urban and peasant societies, which has become a central theme in modern anthropological thought. Some of Engels' criteria, such as metallic money used as an instrument for the domination of the nonproducers over the producers, and the prevalent productive system of slave labor, are no longer
tenable as criteria for the beginning of civilization; it is now well established that these characteristics do not apply to the earliest civilizations. The theoretical formulations of Morgan, Engels, and their contemporary E. B. Tylor were deduced mainly from comparative studies of historic societies and ethnographic reports on living noncivilized peoples; Tylor, however, competently surveyed archeological information to marshal facts in support of the historical validity of their system. The modern reappraisal of the theory of social evolution in the light of inductively established sequences of cultural development was initiated by V. Gordon Childe (1936; 1942), who devoted much effort to analyzing the processes of change on the basis of the data made available by the advancement of the knowledge of prehistoric archeology [see the biography of CHILDE]. The focus of Childe's definition of the concept of civilization is the city, seen as the archetype of the new social order; consequently, he coined the term "urban revolution" to characterize the achievement of civilization. The terms "civilization" and "urban revolution" are frequently taken as equivalent. Childe's explicit statement was that the urban revolution was the culmination of a process of progressive change in economic structure and social organization; the city was the "resultant and symbol" of this revolution (1950, p. 3). This statement implies the recognition of an initial substage of preurban civilization; however, Childe failed to make clear that the terms "civilization" and "urban revolution" are not identical. Childe's concept of the urban revolution stimulated Robert Redfield to reorient his own thoughts on the relationships between rural and urban culture from a historical standpoint. Redfield's ideas on the subject had developed as the result of his experience in modern Yucatan, which led him to rank communities in order of decreasing complexity—city, town, village, and bush hamlet. Originally he analyzed the relationship in merely functional terms, but by the early 1950s he had become aware of the evolutionary implications of his own formulations: the transformation of the folk community into civilized society and the explanation of peasantry as a product of the process of civilization. [See Redfield 1953; 1956; see also PEASANTRY.] Redfield's most significant contributions to the definition of civilization are (1) the conception of the institutionalization of the moral order as a characteristic of civilized societies, in contrast with the traditional ethical systems of the homogeneous local communities; (2) the formulation of the dichotomy of "great tradition-little tradition" in
USHER, ABBOTT P. terms of dynamic interdependence; and (3) the description of the peasant society and culture as the rural dimension of the civilization of which it is part. His thoughts on the nature of civilization were focused on the moral and intellectual dimensions of human experience. His analysis of the process of change from folk culture to civilization and his views on the relation between the urban and rural subcultures in civilized societies rest on the interplay of the "great tradition" and the "little tradition." The "great tradition" is formed by the knowledge, doctrines, philosophy, and aesthetic canons of the elite—the term is approximately synonymous with "high culture" or "hierarchic culture." The "great tradition" is shaped by reflective ideas and speculative thought, and it is consciously cultivated, systematized, and transmitted. The "little tradition" is constituted by the lore, beliefs, folk wisdom, and artistic expressions of the common people—it is the "low" or "lay" culture. The "little tradition" is molded by custom and is refractory to innovation; it is naively taken for granted, neither submitted to premeditated modifications nor handed down in a deliberate way. In the beginning, the high culture of original civilizations necessarily sprouted from the indigenous folkways. But in the course of time, once the "great tradition" and the "little tradition" become differentiated, the relationship is never one-sided; perennially they keep shaping each other. In any civilization the two traditions are interdependent—they "can be thought of as two currents of thought and action, distinguishable, yet ever flowing into and out of each other" [Redfield 1956, p. 72; see also WORLD VIEW and the biography of REDFIELD]. Processes of civilization. Childe's and Redfield's formulations emphasize the dynamic role of cities in the process of civilization; accordingly, the term "urban revolution" is used to refer to the concomitant transformation of the social and cultural structure. Further research is needed on this subject. The importance of urbanization in the development of civilization must be analyzed comparatively, in the light of the inductively established evolutionary sequences. In ancient Sumer, in the Indus Valley, and in the Hwang Ho basin the phenomenon of urban congregation may be as old as civilization. But in ancient Egypt, in Mexico, and in Peru the appearance of all the other characteristics of civilization seems to have preceded the growth of urban centers. In historical perspective, the dawn of civilization does not necessarily coincide with the urban revolution. PEDRO ARMILLAS
221
BIBLIOGRAPHY
CHILDE, V. GORDON (1936) 1965 Man Makes Himself. 4th ed. London: Watts. CHILDE, V. GORDON (1942) 1960 What Happened in History. Rev. ed. Baltimore: Penguin. -> A paperback edition was published in 1964. CHILDE, V. GORDON 1950 The Urban Revolution. Town Planning Review 21:3-17. CHILDE, V. GORDON 1951 Social Evolution. New York: Schumann; London: Watts. -> Based on a series of lectures delivered at the University of Birmingham in 1947/1948. ENGELS, FRIEDRICH (1884) 1942 The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. New York: International Publishers. -> First published in German. MORGAN, LEWIS HENRY (1877) 1964 Ancient Society. Edited by Leslie A. White. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap. H> First published as Ancient Society: Or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress From Savagery Through Barbarism to Civilization. REDFIELD, ROBERT 1953 The Primitive World and Its Transformations. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press. REDFIELD, ROBERT 1956 Peasant Society and Culture: An Anthropological Approach to Civilization. Univ. of Chicago Press. -» A paperback edition, bound together with The Little Community, was published in 1961 by Cambridge University Press. TYLOR, EDWARD B. (1881) 1907 Anthropology: An Introduction to the Study of Man and Civilization. New York: Appleton. -> An abridged paperback edition was published in 1960 by the University of Michigan Press.
URBANIZATION See CITY; POPULATION, article on POPULATION DISTRIBUTION; RURAL SOCIETY.
USHER, ABBOTT P.
Over a period of more than half a century, Abbott Payson Usher (1883-1965) made contributions to scientific inquiry in the field of economic history that covered a wide range of subject matter. His work dealt mainly with European subjects, but his research was so well designed that his particular projects yielded insights with direct significance for the whole body of social thought and science. Perhaps because a certain awkwardness in literary expression tends to mask the exciting qualities of his thought, his work is less well known beyond the confines of economic history than it deserves to be. Within his own field, however, the high quality of his published work—its range, its depth, and, above all, its unfailing sense of proportion— won him international recognition as one of the world's foremost economic historians. The Festschrift, Architects and Craftsmen in History, was an intercontinental tribute to him: it was edited at Boston, published at Tubingen by the List Society, and composed of essays written by economic
222
USHER, ABBOTT P.
historians from several European countries as well as the United States. Usher was born in Lynn, Massachusetts. He took all his academic degrees at Harvard and lived within commuting distance of the Harvard libraries almost continuously from 1920 on. After receiving his bachelor's degree in 1904 and master's degree in 1905, he spent a year in France, studying and gathering data for his work on early grain markets. He completed his doctorate in 1910 and accepted an appointment at Cornell University, where he taught for ten years. He moved to Boston University in 1920 and in 1922 was appointed to the faculty at Harvard, where he taught economics until his retirement in 1949. Although in its continuity of environment Usher's career was perhaps characteristic of an age that is passing, his work itself is essentially modern. "Interdisciplinary" is one of the bywords of contemporary research, and Usher never hesitated to cross boundaries; his work on invention is grounded in the literature of psychology, and his wide reading in legal history in connection with his banking studies convinced him that the "link between credit and lawful money is ... a creation of civil law; it is not a spontaneous outcome of economic relations" (1943, p. 12). Again, the current tendency in writing economic history is to emphasize theoretical and statistical approaches to the subject, and in this respect, too, Usher's work is fully modern. In The History of the Grain Trade in France, 1400-1710, published in 1913, his interest lies in the formation and operation of markets, a dominant concept in economic theory; his Early History of Deposit Banking in Mediterranean Europe, published 30 years later, is firmly anchored in money and banking theory, and in the latter work his treatment of banking in Barcelona is organized according to the main divisions of that theory—interbank relations, banks and the public, and debt management. Theory of inventions. Usher's thought gained its widest currency following the publication of A History of Mechanical Inventions in 1929. The inventing process is represented as a succession of phases. The process starts with recognition of the need for a new production technique, proceeds through a period of partial solutions to the problem, leads to an imaginative synthesis and extension of these partial solutions by someone whose mind is thoroughly conditioned to the problem, and ends with a period of "critical revision" during which the solution is embodied in increasingly elegant and efficient machinery. [See INNOVATION.] This view of inventive activity is, thus, in part a blend of
two extreme theories about invention, the "great man" theory, which in its popular form Usher considered to be romantic nonsense, and the deterministic theory that necessity is the mother of invention. But Usher's eclectic approach goes well beyond these oversimplified theories and provides an analytical description of the process of invention whose usefulness as a means of organizing a wide range of historical material on the subject is evidenced throughout the rest of the book. Usher's "theory" has no predictive power, and he made no such claim for it. It is surely a contradiction in terms to speak of predicting novelty; thus, insofar as inventions are denned in terms of novelty it becomes impossible to devise a theoretical "model" of the inventing process. The body of Usher's work on invention includes discussions of scientific thought and achievement in antiquity and during the Middle Ages, an appraisal of da Vinci's work, and chapters on the history of machinery in various industries, including printing and textile manufacturing. Major emphasis, however, is accorded to the development of fine tools and precision machinery, on the one hand, and to the harnessing of ever larger amounts of inanimate power, on the other. The work as a whole is an unusual and highly successful amalgam of engineering knowledge and historical method. Studies in economic history Because A History of Mechanical Inventions became Usher's most widely known work, his other studies have often been interpreted in terms of his theory of invention, and the development of wholesale grain markets and negotiable bills of exchange, the main themes of his other monographs, have been considered social analogues of mechanical inventions. This interpretation of Usher's work certainly has some validity and is supported, by implication at least, by his own long discussion of "emergent novelty" in history that appeared in 1954 in the revised edition of A History of Mechanical Inventions. But an author is not necessarily the best interpreter of his own work, and to view Usher's total output through the aperture of his theory of invention gives entirely too restricted an impression both of his philosophical status and of his research findings. It would have been unlike Usher (W. N. Parker Architects and Craftsmen 1956, pp. 157—166) to study history from only one point of view. According to Usher, the Marxists, the "ideal-type sociologists" like Max Weber, and historians like Gustav Schmoller, Karl Biicher, and Werner Sombart, who saw historical development as a series of stages, were all insufficiently aware
USHER, ABBOTT P. of the complexity of historical processes. He was also opposed to Clapham's narrative-descriptive approach to history. Economic history, Usher believed, should consist of carefully executed studies of special topics, which would produce both limited causal relationships directly related to the topic and suggestions for wider-ranging historical themes. Markets. The title of Usher's first book, The History of the Grain Trade in France, is slightly misleading, for the study is more than a history in the narrow sense. It is, rather, a historical approach to certain questions concerning the social value of markets. The development of wholesale grain markets is seen as a solution to a major problem of long standing in early modern France, namely, the provision of a reliable food supply for large urban populations. Usher's interest in the operation of markets was probably stimulated by the widespread discussion that took place in the United States during the early part of this century about the alleged malfunctioning of markets in which monopoly elements are apparent, and by academic discussions about the function of organized speculation in commodity markets. Two of his early articles (1915; 1916) dealt specifically with the problem of speculation in both early and modern grain markets. His treatment of the subject is at once lively and theoretically sound. Underlying the argument are two basic propositions: first, that to own is to speculate, and, second, that the more perfect the market, the less the risk of ownership and thus the smaller the component of involuntary speculation in ownership. Accordingly, a comparison of early and modern arrangements shows that while speculation in modern produce markets is more highly specialized and thus more visible, transactions in the very imperfect markets of early modern Europe necessarily involved a much larger speculative element. Moreover, the paucity of commercial intelligence that characterized early markets led speculators to adopt highly predatory tactics based on deception of the consuming public, despite severe laws against engrossing and forestalling. Thus the paradox noted in his 1915 article: "Increased freedom to speculate has in fact narrowed the range of speculation" (p. 371). [See SPECULATION, HEDGING, AND ARBITRAGE.] Usher gave the controversy of his own day about public control of markets a nice twist by changing the setting to France in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and by arguing that an efficient distribution of grain, especially in years of dearth, had necessitated the abandonment of detailed administrative regulation of supply and the develop-
223
ment of organized wholesale markets. The History of the Grain Trade in France is a fascinating study of the slow and halting development of an understanding of, and confidence in, a market mechanism. It took a surprising amount of time to arrive at the market solution—to realize that "higgling and bargaining" between individual buyers and sellers is not a sufficient condition for the formation of organized markets. What is necessary is the creation of markets by deliberate decisions and the operation of these markets according to explicit rules. Thus, it was through a series of enlightened regulations that the central authorities created the first wholesale grain markets in France in certain towns near Paris early in the eighteenth century. Banking. In the preface to his first work Usher referred to the history of the grain trade as being only a chapter in the larger history of commerce and commented that "changes in the mechanism of the general trade of Europe can best be appreciated in terms of the growth of financial machinery for the handling of commercial credit" (1913, p. viii). To understand this growth was his second research task, and he stuck to it through many unavoidable delays for thirty years, until The Early History of Deposit Banking in Mediterranean Europe appeared in 1943. Again his subject was a topical one in both theoretical and historical circles, especially during the 1920s, when theorists had to deal with the new Federal Reserve System and historians were trying to make sense of the controversy about the relationship, if any, between religion and capitalism. Characteristically, Usher seized on certain fundamental issues in the theoretical controversy and studied them empirically. One of his main purposes was "to provide decisive evidence of ... credit creation in ... early banks of deposit" (1943, p. x); having done so, he permitted himself an uncharacteristically sharp sentence: "Just as French diplomats 'discovered' the Pyrenees in the diplomatic crisis of the eighteenth century, so banking theorists 'discovered' deposits in the mid-nineteenth century" (ibid., p. 192). Probably because Usher thought in terms of theoretical questions he always had a happy knack of dissolving time and space and confronting his readers with daring comparisons—as in his juxtaposition of medieval and modern speculation. To drive home his point about credit creation he made rough calculations from his own data and from published data for the United States to show that in Barcelona in the fifteenth century the credit liabilities of the banks were "not less than 3.5 times the reserve. Such reserve ratios and the coefficients of expansion they imply are not widely different
224
USURY
from ratios to be found in sections of the United States in the early nineteenth century" (ibid., pp. 181-182). Throughout the volume, indeed, he showed that often what are assumed to be highly sophisticated inventions of modern credit and banking systems have, in fact, existed, in different institutional forms, in Western economies since at least the fourteenth century. It must be emphasized that Usher was not primarily interested in displaying early examples of contemporary practices; his primary interest was to show that the history of banking is a history of gradual improvement in efficiency rather than a history of dramatic inventions of deposits, paper money, and central banks. Thus, he argued that the greatest single improvement in monetary efficiency during the past six or seven centuries was the development of full negotiability for credit instruments, a development that culminated in England during the seventeenth century, but one to which many generations of merchants, lawyers, and bankers, in many regions, had contributed. Reflecting on this long history, Usher wrote: "The more we learn of the early history of commercial paper, the more evident it becomes that the evolution of ... seemingly simple concepts involved a singularly long and complex process" (ibid., p. 109). It is the story of the seemingly simple wholesale grain market all over again. Locational problems. Usher had a sustained interest in the economics of natural resources and industrial location, subjects which are closely related to his interest in technology. While his findings were not embodied in any comprehensive synthesis, they stimulated several of his students to do a considerable amount of research on locational problems. At times Usher sounded like a geopolitician. Concerning the development of the vast iron ore deposits in Lorraine and around Lake Superior he wrote in 1920 that the "industrial prestige of England has been destroyed by the rise of Germany and the United States. The dislocations in the metal industries have occasioned real disturbances of the general political and economic equilibrium"; he then administered a gentle jolt with the observation that there "is no reason to suppose that other generations may not witness dislocations fully as startling" (1920, pp. 266-268). Throughout his work Usher emphasized the pervasive influence on human affairs of the big, impersonal facts of resource endowments, population change, technology, and geography; his knowledge of the deductive, impersonal technique of economic theory did much to give form and significance to his research. What must be accorded major empha-
sis in the last analysis, however, is his historical scholarship, which at all times is marked by the collation of a very wide range of evidence and by a use of historical materials that is at once skeptical and imaginative. It is a measure of his power as a historian that he used economic theory to illuminate his understanding of society rather than allowing it to dominate, and thus he was able to resist any temptation to use economic theory as a royal road to knowledge. Usher's work has contributed much to our understanding of several of the seemingly simple problems of social science. J. H. DALES [See also BANKING; HISTORY, article on ECONOMIC HISTORY; MARKETS AND INDUSTRIES; TECHNOLOGY.] WORKS BY USHER The History of the Grain Trade in France, 14001710. Harvard Economic Studies, Vol. 9. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. 1915 The Technique of Mediaeval and Modern Produce Markets. Journal of Political Economy 23:365-388. 1916 The Influence of Speculative Marketing Upon Prices. American Economic Review 6:49-60. 1920 An Introduction to the Industrial History of England. Boston: Houghton Miffiin. (1929) 1954 A History of Mechanical Inventions. Rev. ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. -» A paperback edition was published in 1959 by Beacon. 1943 The Early History of Deposit Banking in Mediterranean Europe. Vol. 1: The Structure and Functions of the Early Credit System: Banking in Catalonia, 1240-1723. Harvard Economic Studies, Vol. 75. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. -» Only one volume was published. 1960 The Industrialization of Modern Britain. Technology and Culture 1:109-127. 1913
SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
Architects and Craftsmen in History: Festschrift fur Abbott Payson Usher. Veroffentlichungen des List Gesellschaft, Vol. 2. 1956 Tubingen (Germany): Mohr.
USURY See ECONOMIC THOUGHT, article on ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL THOUGHT; INTEREST.
UTILITARIANISM i. THE PHILOSOPHY ii. SOCIOLOGICAL THOUGHT
/. O. Urmson Talcott Parsons
THE PHILOSOPHY
"Utilitarianism" is a term that has no precise or even unequivocal meaning. It is used both as a name for any ethical theory that seeks to determine the Tightness and wrongness of actions by reference
UTILITARIANISM: The Philosophy to the goodness and badness of their consequences and as a name for the whole body of philosophical and political doctrines that was accepted by Bentham and the philosophical radicals of the nineteenth century. The word "utilitarianism" was invented casually by Bentham and reinvented by J. S. Mill to apply specifically to their own doctrines, but a wider use is now very common. Thus, it is common to refer to Hume, who lived well before Bentham, and G. E. Moore, who had no political interests and rejected the doctrine that pleasure is the sole good, as utilitarians. The basic philosophical position that the merit of actions must be determined by reference to their consequences may be taken as having either of two incompatible aims. It may be interpreted as a manifesto for moral reform, advocating a better and more enlightened method for settling moral issues to replace less satisfactory ways of moral thinking; or it may be interpreted as an analytic doctrine whose aim is to make explicit those canons of sound moral thinking which are always implicitly followed in any sound moral reflection. In this second interpretation, it stands in relation to the practice of moral thinkers in general as a philosophical exposition of scientific method stands to the practice of scientists in general, whereas the first interpretation would be more like the advocacy of a new and "improved" scientific method. Although advocates of utilitarianism have not always been as clear as one could wish about how they should be interpreted, it is better to interpret the most philosophical among them, including Hume, J. S. Mill, and Moore, in the latter, analytical way. Thus, Mill says that, to all moralists who deem it necessary to argue at all, utilitarian arguments are indispensable, and he proceeds to criticize Kant, not for failing to be a utilitarian but for failing to realize that he was one. There are two basic questions that a philosophical utilitarian has to answer. First, he must tell us exactly how we are to determine the Tightness and wrongness of actions in terms of their good and bad consequences; second, he must give us a principle for determining what are good and bad consequences. To put it more simply, he has to tell us both how to determine the right in terms of the good and how to determine the good. The various answers that may be given to these two questions are relatively independent of each other, so that we may consider each question in relative isolation. Determination of the right Act utilitarianism. The best-known answer to the question of how to determine the Tightness of
225
actions by reference to the value of their consequences is that an action is right if, and only if, the value of its total consequences is at least as great as the value of the total consequences of any alternative course of action; an action will be the (only) right one to perform if its total consequences are more valuable than those of any possible alternative course of action. In this view the correct decision about how to act on a particular occasion is ultimately governed by the facts of the particular situation: it will be wrong to kill on one occasion if the killing will have inferior consequences and right to kill on another occasion if the killing will have the best possible consequences. This, the best-known answer, is commonly dubbed "act utilitarianism" or "extreme utilitarianism" by philosophers. It is popularly thought to be the utilitarian answer. But, although they occasionally gave it as an answer, it was certainly not the answer of Hume, Bentham, Austin, and J. S. Mill, and however formulated and however supplemented, it is subject to the gravest difficulties. A sustained attack on it would be out of place here, but a few of these difficulties may be very briefly mentioned. First, the concept of the total consequences of an action is of little value; there is no satisfactory way of delimiting the consequences of any given action. Second, even if the concept can be used, there is clearly no possibility of ever knowing the value of the total consequences of all the possible courses of action on a particular occasion. To meet these two objections, it is sometimes said that appeal should be made to the total foreseeable consequences only; but this modification makes it impossible to recognize the proper distinction between correct moral decisions and honest errors of moral judgment arising from ignorance of fact. We may surely be justified, but mistaken, in acting on the basis of foreseeable consequences only. Third, this famous answer gives us no means of distinguishing moral from other practical issues: it is hard to see how, in this view, I would not be making a moral mistake if I took a party of friends to a less interesting entertainment than I might have chosen for them. Fourth, this answer is quite at variance with ordinary moral thinking: if I give as a reason for acting in a certain way that I have promised to do so, it is absurd either to insist that I am being irrelevant or that I am giving a reason for thinking that acting in that way will have the best consequences. This last objection leads us to an alternative answer to the question of how the Tightness of actions is to be determined with reference to consequences. The point of the objection was that
226
UTILITARIANISM: The Philosophy
in sound moral thinking we do in fact appeal to principles other than that of producing the best total consequences. We also appeal to principles of promise keeping and truthtelling, the kind of principles that are found in the Ten Commandments. The act utilitarian must either reject appeal to all such principles as improper, which is grossly implausible, or more commonly and more plausibly, give them a rule-of-thumb status. Thus, if promise keeping has in past experience nearly always had better results than promise breaking, we may sum up this experience in the generalization "Promise breaking is wrong." It will be wise to keep promises in obscure situations in the light of. this generalization, but it will have no more authority than the bridge player's adage, "Second player plays low"; an appeal to the actual consequences will always override the adage, which has no independent authority. The alternative answer discussed next attempts to do more justice to the role of such moral principles. Rule utilitarianism. Another answer to the question of how to determine the Tightness of actions by reference to the goodness of their consequences is called rule utilitarianism. J. S. Mill in his Utilitarianism (1861) accepted what he took to be the received opinion that the morality of an individual action is not a question of direct perception but of the application of a law to an individual case. The laws Mill had in mind are the ordinary moral principles of truthfulness, honesty, and the like. Such laws Mill called "secondary principles." However, Mill held that moralists do not commonly give us a satisfactory supreme principle for determining which secondary principles it is proper to accept. Mill therefore produced the utilitarian supreme principle that a secondary principle should be accepted and obeyed if, and only if, the consequences of our accepting that principle will be better than those of our either having no principle at all or having some alternative principle. A secondary principle—"Always do X in circumstances Y"—will be justified if our experience shows that, in an overwhelming majority of cases, actions of the kind X have the best consequences in circumstances Y; that is, if the action X in circumstances Y tends to promote the best consequences. Calm reflection on our secondary principles is always desirable, but so long as such a secondary principle is accepted, it should be followed in all cases of action to which it is applicable, without further reference to consequences. But two qualifications must be made. First, it may so happen that two secondary principles conflict on a particular occasion (e.g., the duty of truthtelling and the duty
of respecting confidences), in which case we must fall back on the supreme principle and appeal directly to consequences. Second, while in general to "see a utility in the breach of a rule, greater than . . . in its observance . . . [is] to furnish us with excuses for evil-doing and means of cheating our own conscience" (Mill [1861] 1957, p. 32), secondary principles are the crude handiwork of fallible men subject to "peculiarities of circumstances." Occasions may arise when, with an eye to consequences, we must break a moral principle—perhaps to avoid causing great and unmerited hardship. However, the general principle remains: "We must remember that only in these cases of conflict between secondary principles is it requisite that first principles should be appealed to. There is no case of moral obligation in which some secondary principle is not involved . . ." (ibid., p. 33). Hume was also a "rule utilitarian"; thus he recognized that the repayment of a debt by a poor man with a sick family to a wealthy miser was in itself repugnant but held it justified by the necessary rules of the artificial virtue of justice. Austin, in his lectures on the province of jurisprudence, which Mill had heard, was quite explicit: The probable specific consequences of doing that single act, of forbearing from that single act, or of omitting that single act, are not the objects of the inquiry. The question to be solved is this: —If acts of the class were generally done, or generally forborne or omitted, what would be the probable effect on the general happiness or good? . . . In the tenth, or the hundredth case, the act might be useful: in the nine, or the ninety and nine, the act would be pernicious. If the act were permitted or tolerated in the rare and anomalous case, the motives to forbear in the others would be weakened or destroyed. (Austin [1832-1863] 1954, pp. 38, 41) The need for Bentham to be a rule utilitarian is surely obvious. His main interest was to bring an enlightened legislation into line with morality. His laws were to be defended as very special cases of moral secondary principles. Once it is grasped that in speaking of the "tendencies of actions," Bentham is, like the other utilitarians, speaking of kinds of actions (for particular actions either do or do not have certain consequences, only kinds of actions can tend to have them), then a reading of his work shows him clearly to be a rule utilitarian. To claim that rule utilitarianism as thus presented is free from difficulties would be very optimistic. Without further qualifications it surely gives at least an overly rigid and simple account of moral thinking. But it does at least avoid some of the obvious objections discussed above to which act utilitarianism is liable, and much recent moral phi-
UTILITARIANISM: The Philosophy losophy makes (or criticizes) the attempt to present some viable version of it. The nature of the good We must now turn to the second major question to which utilitarianism is committed to giving an answer: What is the nature of the good, the production of which makes right actions right? On this topic utilitarian exegesis has commonly been both confused and confusing. Bentham's own view (1789) is, no doubt, superficially plain and clear: the only good is pleasure, the only bad is pain. Anything that gives a quantitatively greater balance of pleasure over pain is better than anything giving a lesser balance—the quantity of pleasure being equal, pushpin is as good as poetry. He devised an elaborate calculus for the measurement of pleasure and pain. Thus, he argued, if we mean by "happiness" pleasure and the absence of pain, the good which determines the Tightness of actions will be the greatest happiness of the greatest number. This famous formula was, it appears, coined by Francis Hutcheson and used by Joseph Priestley in his Essay on the First Principles of Government (1768), where Bentham found it. But this formula is much less clear than it seems. If we could somehow measure units of happiness, it is not clear whether on this principle it is better for ten men each to to have a favorable balance of ten units and one an unfavorable balance of one hundred units or for all eleven to have an even balance of pleasure and pain, as Bentham himself came to see. But there is a still more basic difficulty in Bentham's position. At the beginning of his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789) he tells us that mankind is under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think. This is for Bentham the ultimate self-evident truth. It is very hard not to interpret it as the doctrine of psychological hedonism, stating that as a matter of psychological fact men always have the aim of maximizing the balance of their own pleasure over pain. However, this doctrine, so far from being a basis for the ethical doctrine of utilitarianism, is incompatible with any ethical doctrine whatsoever. It would be idle to tell men that they ought to aim at the greatest general happiness or at anything else, even their own happiness, if as a matter of psychological fact, they will inevitably aim at their own greatest happiness. Moreover, the doctrine of psychological hedonism, though perennially attractive, is surely false: not only do men seem at times to be obviously altruistic—at least, as Hume dispassionately observes, when altruism does not
227
thwart self-interest—but even when, for example, a stamp collector gains great pleasure from getting a rare stamp, it seems more plausible to regard his pleasure as a result of his getting what he wanted (the stamp) than to treat his collection of the stamp as a mere idiosyncratic means to his true end, which is pleasure. If he had not wanted the stamp so badly, he would not have been so pleased at obtaining it. Thus, Bentham's doctrine of the good has an unsatisfactory basis, though as we shall see, one that was important to his more practical activities. J. S. Mill paid lip service to the Benthamite position by claiming happiness to be the sole good and defining it as pleasure and the absence of pain. However, it is little more than lip service. First, he allowed that pleasures may differ in quality as well as in quantity, but as critics have constantly observed, this means that something other than pleasantness determines goodness. Second, he makes preference by a wise and experienced judge the criterion of superior pleasantness, but this makes vacuous the claim that we prefer things because of their greater pleasantness. Ultimately, it is hard to see that Mill said more than that happiness is the life most worth living in the judgment of the wise and that we should have as our aim the provision of such a life for as many people as possible, which is as unrevealing as it is unexceptionable. Two other utilitarian, but non-Benthamite, answers to the question of the nature of the good deserve mention. First there is the view, held, for example, by G. E. Moore (1903), that there is no single answer to the question. In this view there are many different things, pleasure among them, that are good in themselves and which we have a duty to promote. Moore mentions, among others, love, beauty, and knowledge. Anything that is, say, both pleasant and beautiful would be superior to what was only pleasant, or only beautiful, to the same degree. Though this position is linked in Moore with a doctrine of intuition of nonnatural characteristics and the attempt to give a list of "goods" seems artificial, the view that there are many quite different things which are good independently of each other is in accord with common ways of thinking, even if repugnant to the philosopher's desire for neat and simple answers to questions. Second, there is the view, sometimes called negative utilitarianism, of which Karl Popper is a noted exponent. According to negative utilitarianism, it is a mistake to suppose that in order to answer the question of what consequences are relevant to the Tightness of actions it is necessary to determine what consequences of actions in general can be
228
UTILITARIANISM: The Philosophy
counted good. It maintains that there may well be many good consequences of actions which are quite irrelevant to their morality, for morality is concerned, negatively, only with the elimination of avoidable suffering. Moral norms, secondary principles, are justified by the fact that social life would be impossible, or at least to some degree intolerable, unless those norms were observed. Social life would be impossible if there were a habit of violence, so there is a generally recognized universal duty to abstain from violence; it would be intolerable if we were continually misled by our fellows, so there is a recognized universal duty of truthfulness and promise keeping. Yet, though the production of beautiful works of art and the increase of human knowledge are great goods, neither is a recognized duty, even of those who are capable of them (even if the latter is a contractual duty of university professors). To go out of our way to help our neighbors is admirable, but it is a work of supererogation —there is no recognized universal duty to do so. There is much to be said for this viewpoint. Moreover, whatever Mill may have said in Utilitarianism, it is tacitly accepted by him in his On Liberty (1859), where he denies the existence of any warrant for norms, whether legal or moral, save that of the prevention of harm to others. Political implications Utilitarianism has so far been presented as a highly abstract philosophical doctrine, as an attempt to give a very general account of the nature of moral thinking. Some attempt has been made to sketch some of the principal answers given by various utilitarians to two of the basic questions with which they are confronted. This purely philosophical element is, indeed, of central importance in utilitarianism, and it has always been regarded by utilitarians themselves as such, but it remains to be explained how, particularly in nineteenth-century England, such an abstract doctrine could have been the basis for a practical program of political, legal, and moral reform. It has been claimed in this article that the utilitarians regarded themselves not as proposing a new morality but as analyzing the nature of sound moral thinking in a way similar to the analysis of scientific method. However, the analyst of scientific method need not claim that there is no erroneous thinking, no superstition, on matters scientific. Certainly the utilitarians did not wish to claim that all our norms—the secondary principles of morality, our political institutions, our penal codes—were in fact based on utilitarian considerations. One has only to glance at Mill's On Liberty to realize that he thought many of them to be founded on supersti-
tion, class interest, bigotry, and unthinking custom. Thus, there were two practical tasks for Mill as a utilitarian: he had to fight the attitude of bigotry and superstition by writing such polemical works as On Liberty and The Subjection of Women, and he had to provide knowledge of the consequences of social action by economic and sociological investigation to enable sound norms to be found by those with the desire to find them. Finally, there was the need for direct, practical action whereby the better norms discovered by enlightened utilitarians, with the aid of Bentham's investigations of penal institutions and Ricardo's discoveries in economics, might be brought into practical operation. Bentham's proposals on penal reform merit some special examination, both in their own right and because they underline certain general points already made. For Bentham the purpose and justification of penal laws were no different from those of the secondary principles of morality—they required justification by the general happiness principle. Penal laws differed from moral principles only in their provenance—being the commands of an Austinian sovereign—and in having a political sanction instead of, or in addition to, the physical, moral, and legal sanctions that other norms might have. Punishment, being the infliction of pain, is in itself a bad thing. Therefore, legislators will be justified in passing a penal law only if the general happiness it causes greatly outweighs the evil of punishment for its nonobservance. Now since the act made illegal would be done only if the doing of it would maximize the agent's happiness, in the absence of a penal sanction, the task of the legislator in framing the penal sanction must be to impose the minimum sanction that will outweigh the advantage of performing the act; hence the importance of an accurate hedonic calculus. There are two especially interesting features of this view. First, it is an excellent illustration of the direct application of the utilitarian principle to practical problems of legislation and penology; second, it shows well the importance of the doctrine of psychological hedonism in Bentham's thought, for the penal sanction is clearly thought of by Bentham as a mechanism for directing self-regarding action into socially useful channels, rather as a government might try to control investment by manipulating the interest rate; criminal law is a device for making the socially useful profitable to the individual agent. At this point our survey of utilitarian thought must end. It seems that no utilitarian account of moral thought has yet succeeded in doing justice to all the complexities of our moral thought, and
UTILITARIANISM: Sociological Thought yet the general utilitarian position continues to exert a strong attraction. In time a sufficiently subtle version of utilitarianism may succeed in giving a general elucidation of moral thinking. Perhaps there are both utilitarian and nonutilitarian elements in conventional ways of moral thinking and it is possible that a pure utilitarianism must be, at least in part, a moral program rather than a philosophical elucidation. J. O. URMSON [See also DECISION MAKING, article on PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS; LIBERALISM; PENOLOGY, article on THE FIELD; SOCIAL CONTROL, article on THE CONCEPT; and the biographies of AUSTIN; BENTHAM; DURKHEIM; HALEVY; HOBBES; HUME; MILL. Other relevant material may be found under POLITICAL THEORY.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
AUSTIN, JOHN (1832-1863) 1954 The Province of Jurisprudence Determined and The Uses of the Study of Jurisprudence. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson; New York: Noonday Press. -> Two books bound together. BENTHAM, JEREMY (1789) 1948 An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. New ed. New York: Hafner. HALEVY, ELIE (1901-1904) 1952 The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism. New ed. London: Faber. -» First published in French. HUME, DAVID (1739-1740) 1958 A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Clarendon. -> Reprinted from the original edition; contains an analytical index. HUTCHESON, FRANCIS (1725) 1753 An Inquiry Into the Origins of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue: In Two Treatises. 5th ed., corrected. London. -» The first work by the first influential English utilitarian. LYONS, DAVID 1965 Forms and Limits of Utilitarianism Oxford Univ. Press. MILL, JOHN STUART (1859) 1963 On Liberty. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill. MILL, JOHN STUART (1861)1957 Utilitarianism. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill. MOORE, G. E. (1903) 1954 Principia ethica. Cambridge Univ. Press. -> A paperback edition was published in 1959. PRIESTLEY, JOSEPH (1768) 1771 Essay on the First Principles of Government, and on the Nature of Political, Civil, and Religious Liberty. 2d ed., enl. London. STEPHEN, LESLIE (1900)1950 The English Utilitarians. Series of Reprints of Scarce Works on Political Economy, Nos. 9-11. 3 vols. London School of Economics and Political Science; Gloucester, Mass.: Smith. -» A detailed study of Bentham and the two Mills. TOULMIN, STEPHEN E. (1950) 1960 An Examination of the Place of Reason in Ethics. Cambridge Univ. Press. -» An important statement of negative utilitarianism. II SOCIOLOGICAL THOUGHT
The movement of thought generally known as utilitarianism, which had its center in England from the seventeenth until well into the twentieth century, provided one of the most important frames
229
of reference in the shaping of social science theory, including sociological theory. The foundations of utilitarianism were laid above all by Hobbes and Locke, with their very different emphases; its culminating phase involved the sequence of eminent writers that extends from Adam Smith, through Bentham, Austin, Malthus, and Ricardo, to John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer. It was a frame of reference based on the action of the individual, but was extended, in ways that led directly to the conception of "social system," to include the interaction of an indefinite plurality of individuals. The individual of the utilitarians, unlike his counterpart in the Cartesian scheme, was an actor, not a knower. That he had goals (which Hobbes called "passions" and the economists called "wants") was a basic assumption. In the main utilitarian tradition, however, little attention was paid to the interconnections between the different wants actuating the same individual or to the origins of these wants. To be sure, the associationist psychologists, building largely on Locke's epistemology, developed a rudimentary theory in this area which has remained continuously influential, especially in the modern behaviorist movement. But since behaviorism has not strongly emphasized the organization of an individual's wants into a personality system, it has not had the same degree of impact on sociological theory as has psychoanalysis, for instance, or the type of social psychology deriving from Cooley and Mead, or even that deriving from Durkheim and his school. The major utilitarian premises The primary focus of utilitarianism was on the process of action designed to satisfy given wants of individuals—that is, on goal-attainment, or wantsatisfaction, whichever way it was put. The process was understood to be one of choosing means that would effectively gain the end. Since this conception was inherently "teleological," in the sense that the behavior was conceived as purposive, it required some normative reference beyond the mere desirability of being satisfied. This was the origin of the famous concept of rationality in the restricted sense of choosing those means and concrete behaviors that are "best adapted" to attainment of the end. Eventually it became clear that the relations among multiple ends had to be considered in a double sense: as the various ends of the same individual actor, and as the ends of different participants in an interactive system. The most obvious way of introducing the consideration of multiple ends was through some conception of cost. Accordingly, to the conception of rational adaptation of means to ends was added the conception of scarcity, or the
230
UTILITARIANISM: Sociological Thought
fact that the same means can be appropriate to the attainment of more than one end and that their utilization for one end may entail sacrificing their potential for attaining alternative ends (this eventually came to be understood as the economic conception of cost). However, the process of goalattainment can be impeded by other obstacles, in addition to the sacrifice of alternative uses of means. For instance, there may be factors in the situation that cannot be overcome or consequences of the line of action that are noxious to the actor. These considerations constitute the essential conceptual setting of the famous utilitarian doctrine of hedonism—a doctrine which found its classic expression in the works of Bentham. Here, pleasure is regarded essentially as the gratifying consequence of successful rational action and pain as the subjective cost of encountering noxious consequences, some of which would not have been "chosen" if means and ends had been rationally considered. Hedonism at the utilitarian level of its development was surely not a scientific psychological theory so much as a specialized language, to be used for formulating the balance between advantage and disadvantage in the attempt at rational satisfaction of wants. Nevertheless, the allegation that it was a definite theory of motivation has figured very prominently in this whole tradition of thought, especially perhaps through the claim that economic theory rested on hedonistic psychological postulates that rendered it vulnerable to refutation on psychological grounds. It turns out, however, that neither economics nor the sociological problems associated with utilitarianism depend basically on a single narrowly defined set of psychological assumptions. As aspects of the theory of social systems they are interdependent with the theory of personality and that of the behavioral organism, but this relationship is very different from that envisaged in the older discussions about psychological hedonism [see SYSTEMS ANALYSIS, article on SOCIAL SYSTEMS, and compare Parsons 1961, part 2]. The concept of rationality, as developed in the utilitarian tradition, is not so much a psychological theory—as it has often been held to be—as a value premise. Particularly as used by the classical economists, the concept defined a pattern of behavior which was expected to be recognized as the optimum by men engaged in economic activity. The extent to which actual behavior met these criteria was a distinct problem (see, for instance, the discussion in Parsons & Smelser 1956). The model of action introduced and developed by the utilitarians was thus exceedingly simple; above all, it was not psychologically sophisticated.
Its very simplicity, however, not only enabled it to serve as the vehicle for certain very important positive developments in social theory, but also facilitated the posing of sharp questions about its limits which eventually led to its being transcended. Including the conception of rationality as just characterized, utilitarianism can be said to have constituted, in its individual reference, a theory of the rational pursuit of self-interest. But the more significant developments for which utilitarianism was responsible concerned "interests" in the utilitarian sense. At this level the utilitarian scheme implied a conception of what we now call the social system. Hobbes versus Locke Halevy (1901-1904), in his virtually definitive analysis of utilitarianism, dealt with its first basic cleavage, which arose in its founding generation as the difference between Hobbes and Locke. This difference centered on attitudes toward the problem of social order and its basis. In Hobbes's account, the consequence of generalizing the rational pursuit of self-interest in a social system was progressive intensification of the elements of interindividual conflict which were inherent in the utilitarian assumptions. Though Hobbes certainly understood the factor of economic scarcity, he regarded the fundamental source of conflict to be the fact that any individual's pursuit of his own interests can eventuate only in injury to the interests of others. Since, Hobbes contended, "there is no common rule of good and evil to be taken from the objects themselves," the process will result in every man becoming the enemy of every other, so that all will "endeavor to destroy or subdue one another." The outcome is the famous Hobbesian state of nature, the "war of all against all," in which the life of man is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short" (Hobbes 1651). The resort to mutual hostility, destruction, and subjection is motivated by one element of order which Hobbes assumed to be present in the wantsystem of the individual, namely the primacy of the "passion for self-preservation." It is the presence of this primacy in everyone that generates the vicious circle of a deepening conflict that operates through fraud and force. But unless individual men are to limit the possibilities of their existence to such conditions, there must be some collective equivalent of individual self-interest and of its ultimate form, the interest in self-preservation. Hobbes found this equivalent in the generalization of the interest in social order (a higher level of rationality than the strictly utilitarian), which he thought could be attributed to the act of the social contract
UTILITARIANISM: Sociological Thought by which a sovereign authority was set up to impose order. Having limited his "psychology" to the level of individual self-interest, and having implied that only punitive sanctions could effectively restrain the war of all against all, Hobbes had to postulate a rigorously authoritarian sovereign to whom men forfeit their "natural rights" to pursue their own self-interest to the point of conflict with others. Hobbes's conception of sovereignty, with its sharp dichotomization between the mass of individual men—subjects, we may say—and the single, undivided source of authority, remained a continuing theme in utilitarian thought. Probably its most important later appearance was in the jurisprudence of Austin, with its conception that legal legitimacy may be derived through a series of deductions from the conception of sovereignty itself. Indeed, since Marxian theory also tended to adopt uncritically the utilitarian model of action in the interest of individual want-satisfaction, especially as this model was mediated by Ricardian economics, it seems that the rigorous conception of the sovereignty of the Communist party may well owe much to the heritage of Hobbes. The use of the concept of power in Western political theory also derives mainly from the Hobbesian tradition. The other main trend of utilitarian thought, stemming from Locke, set the tone that predominated during the culminating age of utilitarianism. Here a key concept, presented in Locke but greatly developed by Adam Smith and his successors, was the division of labor, which, on utilitarian assumptions, was made possible by the existence of mutual advantage in exchange. Such mutual advantage, however, presupposed the existence of an order which somehow constituted a solution of the Hobbesian problem, the more so the more extended the system of exchange relationships. As Halevy showed, this solution in Locke's case rested entirely on an assumption of the natural identity of interests (Halevy 1901-1904). Locke assumed that, instead of being impelled, because of scarcity and a consequent interest in mutual obstruction, to "destroy or subdue one another," men are so attracted by the possibilities of mutually furthering each other's interests through the division of labor and exchange that they need not resort to the strategies of conflict. Locke (1690), like Hobbes, grounded social order in a social contract, but gave it a directly obverse emphasis. Whereas Hobbes conceived of his contracting parties as surrendering their "natural rights" to the sovereign, Locke conceived of his as mutually contracting to protect each other's rights
231
to "life, liberty and property" and as setting up a minimal government for that purpose. Locke's version of the utilitarian conception of the social system had critical consequences in two main directions. First, his conception of the direct and immediate rational pursuit of self-interest by individuals within the context of the division of labor and exchange provided the frame of reference within which the classical economics developed. Its most distinguished theorist, David Ricardo (1817), developed by far the most sophisticated theoretical analysis of an abstracted aspect of human social action which had yet appeared. To a large degree, it then dominated not only technical economics but the general economic liberalism of so much of the Western world in the nineteenth century. Second, Locke also greatly influenced social science through his analysis of the grounding of political democracy; he provided a basis that differed sharply from that of the French analysis, which stemmed above all from Rousseau and which contained more of the heritage of Hobbes than of Locke (though still more of the heritage of Descartes). Order again a problem: Malthus and Marx Utilitarian thought, however, had left the basic problem of order unsolved; Locke did not answer Hobbes, but only bypassed him. These chickens came home to roost, before the full emergence of sociology, at two primary points: in the works of Malthus, and in those of Marx, who was in part a utilitarian. Malthus presented what was, in part, a synthesis of Hobbes and Locke. He did not question the existence of social order, the division of labor, or the process of exchange. Nor was he preoccupied with political authority. Rather, he focused on a set of conditions of economic life which were antecedent to any natural identity of interests, namely the numbers of the population which had to share the resources available to a society. He postulated a general tendency for human beings to reproduce beyond the means of subsistence, generating pressure on those means. This pressure was held to lead, unless counteracted, to the "positive checks," especially famine, which were to form such an important model in the more popular versions of the principle of natural selection. Malthus also saw the pressure of population as responsible for another dimension of the division of labor. He called this dimension the "division of society into classes," notably into the landowners, "capitalists," and laborers who figured so prominently in classical economics. If the idea of the positive checks fed directly into Darwinism and especially into social
232
UTILITARIANISM: Sociological Thought
Darwinism, the class doctrine, which Malthus did not originate but to which he gave a new rationale, fed very directly into socialist thought, especially that of Marx and his followers. Thus Marx, under Malthus' influence, reintroduced a Hobbesian element by holding that productive efficiency adequate to mitigate the pressure of population was dependent on an inequality of economic resources which, at the level of the firm, became the focus of a power relation (compare Hobbes 1651, chapter 10). This relation was the structural focus of the Marxian theory of capitalistic exploitation. Malthus thus reactivated the Hobbesian themes by raising serious questions about the "harmonistic" implications of the Lockean conceptions. A notable instance of the interplay of ideological and theoretical conceptions was Ricardo's use of the Malthusian "principle of population" to ground the famous "iron law of wages." On the one hand, this served to solve Ricardo's central theoretical problem of the distribution of wealth by anchoring the share of wages in an extraeconomic explanation. But on the other hand, it also set the stage for the Marxian theory of exploitation. The distinctiveness of Marx in this respect lies in the fact that he constructed the first major bridge between the social thought of German idealism, in which he was reared, and that of English utilitarianism. From utilitarianism to social Darwinism Among English utilitarians, and for the most part their American affiliates, it was scarcely until the time of Keynes that the disturbing implications of the Malthusian episode began to be taken adequately into account. What I have called the "harmonistic" themes again prevailed, certainly in intimate connection with the atmosphere of social and political reform which gathered force in the early to middle nineteenth century in Great Britain. We may perhaps say that Austin and Bentham conceived the Hobbesian problem to have been solved, perhaps by the British constitution, which could be construed as a latter-day embodiment of Locke's natural identity of interests. Though in ways which now appear theoretically dubious, Austin gave a very important intellectual basis for the legitimation of legal order, which was so essential to British society, and, through the sovereign as then conceived, for the rather special symbiosis of social groups which characterized nineteenth-century Britain, notably of the aristocracy and the middle class. Bentham may be said to have represented the more democratic wing of utilitarianism. Perhaps more than any other figure he is the intellectual
father of British socialism, the proponent of the use of public authority as an instrumentality of social reform (see especially Bentham 1789). A strong egalitarian underpinning was expressed in the Benthamite formula of "the greatest good of the greatest number," though until the advent of marginal utility theory late in the nineteenth century it was difficult to say what even the economic aspect of the greatest good for a single individual might be. As for the "greatest number": from an ethical point of view it remained sheer assumption that all persons had equal claims to whatever the greatest good might be, though this did not detract from the logic of Bentham's argument. Bentham's "philosophy," with its hedonistic formulae, remained the most immediate broader background of economic thinking and policy and of reform politics for a long time. It also underlay the tendency, still present among economists, to consider the wants of different individuals to be in principle incommensurable; the assumption was challenged by Pareto (1916) for the conception of the utility of a society in a sense broader than the economic (compare Arrow 1951). John Stuart Mill was the great synthesizer of the utilitarian tradition over the whole range of its concerns in ethics, economics, and political theory. He was also in many ways highly conscious of its difficulties and attempted to solve what seems to be the most formidable of these from the present point of view, the problem of order, by developing the new formula of social utility, i.e., the conception that through his own intelligent insight the individual could come to understand that his selfinterest was bound up with the common interest, and to act upon that understanding. Probably the most important break with the harmonistic themes of English utilitarianism came through the influence of Darwinism and through the attempt to extend Darwinian principles to the human social world. There were relatively obvious connections between the processes of natural selection and of economic competition, reinforced by the Malthusian heritage, though Keynes (19191947) certainly exaggerated in saying that Darwinism could be considered one grand generalization of the Ricardian economics. Furthermore, the conception of evolution came to be applied in the social field by a whole series of writers, among whom Herbert Spencer was the most prominent. The conception of "nature red in tooth and claw" certainly again raised acutely the problem of order; but perhaps equally serious for the utilitarian framework was a challenge to the postulate of the givenness of wants. Hard on the heels of Darwin-
UTILITARIANISM: Sociological Thought ism came the instinct theory in biology and psychology, attempting to introduce order into human motivation within the utilitarian framework—McDougall's Social Psychology, first published in 1908, being perhaps the most influential work. A broadened theory of social action could not evade this problem and there was clearly no solution to be derived from strict utilitarian premises. Simple assimilation to general biological theory also failed to survive as the most acceptable solution. On the broad base of Darwinian biology, and in terms of the heredity—environment distinction, increasing attention was given to the conception of the importance of the learned content of transmissible experience—a conception which came to be formulated in the anthropological concept of culture. The break with utilitarian premises Both the tension in the utilitarian position and one of the ways in which this tension could be resolved can be illustrated by two major incidents. The first was the relation between John Stuart Mill and Auguste Comte. The two developed an exceedingly close personal friendship. It proved, however, that the intellectual differences between them were too deep for it to endure and they eventually broke with each other. Mill documented the break with the exceedingly interesting little book, Auguste Comte and Positivism (1865). Basically the issue was that Mill was what I have called an "analytical individualist" and could not stomach the collective emphasis of Comte. The second incident was the intrusion into the economics of Alfred Marshall, the main founder of fully modern British economics, of an element which, in retrospect, can be seen clearly to be anomalous in a utilitarian system. This was his refusal to endorse wholeheartedly the reliance of economic theory on the theory of "want-satisfaction" as newly refined by the principle of marginal utility. Instead, he insisted on the importance of what he called "activities," which he himself referred to the Ricardian labor theory of value, but which turned out to involve internalized values on a level incompatible with the utilitarian assumption of the givenness of wants (Marshall 1890; compare Parsons 1937, chapter 3). In the sociological as distinct from the economic direction, there is an important line which runs from Mill through Spencer to Hobhouse. Spencer was the one who stressed the individualistic side, with special reference to social policy, while Hobhouse was in the tradition of Mill, as perhaps the last major social utilitarian. But the theoretically specific solutions to the
233
problem of social order derived primarily from contact with other main traditions of thought. The earliest of these solutions was proposed in Marxian theory; as already noted, Marx was both German idealist—in inverted form, of course—and utilitarian. Yet Marxism did not take hold strongly in Britain, so that the importance of Marx probably lay more in exporting utilitarianism to continental Europe than in bringing historical materialism to Britain. However, Marx's conception of the constraining system of competitive and power relations did have a fruitful affinity with Durkheim's later formulation of society as a "reality sui generis" (1895). Durkheim oriented his analysis directly to the system of economic individualism. He issued a fundamental challenge to the utilitarian analysis of it, couching his argument explicitly in terms of the problem of order. The crucial factor, ignored in the utilitarian scheme, was that of an institutionalized normative order, of which the institution of contract was the key element in the economic context. This institution could not be derived from the interests of the contracting parties, but presupposed an independent source in what Durkheim called the conscience collective (1893). Major alternatives to utilitarianism Two crucial developments, which owed much to the Cartesian tradition of French thought, arose from the interpretation of the implications of this break with the utilitarian scheme. One of these was the articulation of the basis of social order with legal tradition, as anchored in turn in cultural factors, not simply in the interests of individuals. This view was closer to Hobbes and Austin than to Locke, but came to emphasize values held in common by the participants in a social system, and eventually the grounding of these values in religious tradition. This outcome, which was reached by Durkheim late in his career, did not radically cut social institutions off from the biological realm. Rather it introduced a whole series of distinctions among factors intermediate between the manifestations of the genetic constitution of a species, such as instincts, and a variety of socially and culturally ordered entities, among which religion comprised the highest set of components. This paved the way for a new and much more sophisticated attempt to fit society and its evolutionary development into the general world of biological life. The second major direction of innovation was into the realm of utilitarian wants, which we now consider that of personality. In Durkheim's work this took the form of the conception of the internal-
234
UTILITARIANISM: Sociological Thought
ization of social norms and objects in the personality of the individual, so that the primary sanctions lay in their moral authority (1893). This was an extreme antithesis of the Hobbesian position. The same applies to sociocultural values, a complex that Durkheim saw as basically accounting for societal integration, that is, as providing the solution of the problem of social order. Here Durkheim converged with Freud, and with the social psychology of Cooley (1902) and Mead (1934) which was developing in the United States. Starting from a base in German idealism, and with a polemical attitude toward both idealism and Marxism, Max Weber had independently been developing similar conceptions. His initial empirical insight was that a major component in the motivation for profit-making economic activity—the paradigmatic case for the utilitarian conception of the rational pursuit of self-interest—lay in the religiously derived values of the "Protestant ethic" (Weber 1904-1905). If Weber's thesis were empirically correct, this effect of the Protestant ethic could only be explained by the internalization of its values in the personality. Such an explanation constituted a basic divergence with Durkheim, Freud, and others. Weber generalized this insight immensely in his comparative analyses of economic, political, legal, and religious structures and their processes of historical development. Utilitarianism and sociological theory With both Marx and the anthropological tradition in the background, these theoretically specific breaks with the limitations of the utilitarian frame of reference constituted the main step in the emergence of sociological theory, a process in which the two most important figures were undoubtedly Durkheim and Weber. They brought to bear on the utilitarian scheme critical points of view derived from other major intellectual traditions and achieved original syntheses which were not derivable from any of their antecedent heritages. Indeed, it can be said that anything like a satisfactory sociological theory could not have been developed at all within the utilitarian framework. Mill and Spencer probably came the closest to such a theory, yet Durkheim's critique of Spencer cannot but be regarded as definitive (Durkheim 1893, book 1, chapter 3). But this consideration, important as it is, should not be allowed to obscure the fact that the utilitarians made enormous contributions toward establishing sociological theory. They introduced the most sophisticated conception of a system of social interaction which had yet appeared, one which was developed most impressively by the classical economists and their successors
[see INTERACTION, article on SOCIAL INTERACTION]. Second, they defined, in terms of a coherent frame of reference, a systematically ordered set of boundaries for the economic aspect of the social system, most importantly vis-a-vis the political system. Though the basic problem posed by Hobbes could not be solved in utilitarian terms, Locke, Bentham, Austin, and Mill, acting on the assumption that they had partly solved it, were able to make major contributions to the analysis of how political systems function. These contributions have remained essential to the development of both legal and political theory, the latter especially in the field of democratic processes. Very important generalizations in the field of social stratification came from the work of Malthus, Ricardo, and Marx [see STRATIFICATION, SOCIAL, article on SOCIAL CLASS]. The utilitarian assumption of the givenness of wants posed essential problems for psychology which modern personality theory is perhaps only now beginning to resolve. The utilitarian strain in economic theory has been somewhat accentuated in the last generation in connection with the development of highly technical, particularly mathematical, economic theory. The very simplicity of the utilitarian framework favors its use in this context because it makes certain mathematical manipulations possible. The problem of the broader social relevance of these assumptions was sharply raised as long ago as the 1920s by persons much involved in that tradition, notably Pareto and Schumpeter, but a major segment of contemporary economics continues to operate in these terms. This segment is matched by the behavioristic movement in psychology, which also had Locke as its founding father. Its more immediate origin, however, was more Darwinian than it was economic. With a Lockean environmentalist emphasis, it went behind the givenness of wants to study the process of their acquisition through learning mechanisms; indeed for a time it was claimed that learning theory constituted the whole of psychology. Even though concerned to explain the genesis of wants, rather than the behavior following from them once established, behavioristic psychology on the whole has the same basic theoretical structure as did the classical utilitarian schemes. It is not surprising that behavioristic psychology and the more rigorous kind of economic theory have tended to form certain alliances, and that these have tended to be projected into the realm of sociology. The most prominent representative of the latter trend is George Homans (1961), who claims that behavioristic psychology and the economic theory of exchange are virtually identical and can
UTILITARIANISM: Sociological Thought constitute the common basis of a general theory of social processes [see INTERACTION, article on SOCIAL EXCHANGE]. These trends of thought stand today in dialectic tension with the more "holistic" trends deriving from Durkheim, Weber, Mead, and their forebears. The general economic-behavioristic theme is a version of the "elementarism" that would deny the independent significance of systemic properties by reducing all of them to elementary components. These trends are also intimately associated with many of the concerns for quantification, greatly reinforced by the recent resource of the use of computers, which are so prominent in the social sciences of the late 1960s. The broad conflict between elementarism and holism seems to be general to the whole range of modern science. Utilitarianism was intimately connected with the early frame of reference of the physical sciences, and has served to connect social science both with these and with the emerging biological sciences. Above all, utilitarianism contributed the concept of an abstractly defined system of interaction in the human social field. This is a platform on which sociology as well as economics and psychology must stand. It seems to me, however, that a purely utilitarian sociology will not prove to be viable, but that a synthesis of the utilitarian contribution and those contributions deriving above all from German idealism and from French collectivistic positivism will prove to shape the theoretical future of the sciences of human behavior, society, and culture more than any one of these traditions taken alone. TALCOTT PARSONS [See also CONFLICT; COOPERATION; DECISION MAKING, article on ECONOMIC ASPECTS; DUTY; LEGITIMACY; LIBERALISM; MORAL DEVELOPMENT; PENOLOGY, article on THE FIELD; SOCIAL CONTRACT; SOCIAL DARWINISM; SOVEREIGNTY; SYSTEMS ANALYSIS, article on SOCIAL SYSTEMS; UTILITY; and the biographies of AUSTIN; BENTHAM; COMTE; DURKHEIM; HALEVY; HOBBES; HOBHOUSE; LOCKE; McDoUGALL; MARSHALL; MARX; MILL; RICARDO; SCHUMPETER; SMITH, ADAM; SPENCER; WEBER, MAX.] BIBLIOGRAPHY ARROW, KENNETH J. (1951) 1963 Social Choice and Individual Values. 2d ed. New York: Wiley. AUSTIN, JOHN (1832-1863)1954 The Province of Jurisprudence Determined and The Uses of the Study of Jurisprudence. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson; New York: Noonday. BENTHAM, JEREMY (1789) 1948 An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. New York: Hafner. BRINTON, CLARENCE CRANE (1933)1949 English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge,
235
Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. -> A paperback edition was published in 1962 by Harper. COOLEY, CHARLES H. (1902) 1956 Human Nature and the Social Order. Rev. ed. In Charles H. Cooley, Two Major Works: Social Organization and Human Nature and the Social Order. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. -» With individual title page and pagination. Published separately in paperback in 1964 by Schocken. DURKHEIM, SMILE (1893) 1960 The Division of Labor in Society. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. -> First published as De la division du travail social. DURKHEIM, SMILE (1895) 1958 The Rules of Sociological Method. 8th ed. Edited by George E. G. Catlin. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. -» First published as Les regies de la methode sociologique. DURKHEIM, EMILE (1898-1911) 1953 Sociology and Philosophy. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. -» Written between 1898-1911. First published posthumously in French. HALEVY, ELIE (1901-1904)1952 The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism. New ed. London: Faber. -» First published in French. HOBBES, THOMAS (1651) 1946 Leviathan: Or, the Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiasticall and Civil. Edited with an introduction by Michael Oakeshott. Oxford: Blackwell. HOMANS, GEORGE C. 1961 Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms. New York: Harcourt. HULL, CLARK L. 1943 Principles of Behavior: An Introduction to Behavior Theory. New York: Appleton. HUME, DAVID (1741-1742)1912 Essays Moral, Political and Literary. Edited by T. H. Green and T. H. Grose. 2 vols. New York and London: Longmans. -» First published as Essays Moral and Political; title changed in the 1758 edition. KEYNES, JOHN MAYNARD (1919-1947) 1951 Essays in Biography. New ed. Edited by Geoffrey Keynes. New York: Horizon. -» A paperback edition was published in 1963 by Norton. LOCKE, JOHN (1690) 1960 Two Treatises of Government. Edited by Peter Laslett. Cambridge Univ. Press. McDoUGALL, WILLIAM (1908) 1950 An Introduction to Social Psychology. 30th ed. London: Methuen. -> A paperback edition was published in 1960 by Barnes and Noble. MALTHUS, THOMAS R. (1798) 1958 An Essay on Population. 2 vols. New York: Dutton. -> First published as An Essay on the Principle of Population. A paperback edition was published in 1963 by Irwin. MARSHALL, ALFRED (1890) 1961 Principles of Economics. 9th ed. 2 vols. New York and London: Macmillan. -> A variorum edition. The eighth edition is preferable for normal use. MEAD, GEORGE H. (1934) 1963 Mind, Self and Society From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Edited by Charles W. Morris. Univ. of Chicago Press. -» Published posthumously. MILL, JOHN STUART (1848) 1961 Principles of Political Economy, With Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy. 7th ed. Edited by W. J. Ashley. New York: Kelley. MILL, JOHN STUART (1859) 1963 On Liberty. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill. MILL, JOHN STUART (1861)1962 Considerations on Representative Government. Chicago: Regnery. -» Reprint of the original edition. MILL, JOHN STUART (1865) 1961 Auguste Comte and Positivism. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press. -»
236
UTILITIES, PUBLIC
First published in two parts in Volume 83 of the Westminster Review. PARETO, VILFREDO (1916) 1963 The Mind and Society: A Treatise on General Sociology. 4 vols. New York: Dover. -» First published as Trattato di sociologia generale. Volume 1: Non-logical Conduct. Volume 2: Theory of Residues. Volume 3: Theory of Derivations. Volume 4: The General Form of Society. PARSONS, TALCOTT (1937) 1949 The Structure of Social Action: A Study in Social Theory With Special Reference to a Group of Recent European Writers. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. PARSONS, TALCOTT (1961) 1965 An Outline of the Social System. Volume 1, pages 30-79 in Talcott Parsons et al. (editors), Theories of Society: Foundations of Modern Sociological Theory. New York: Free Press. PARSONS, TALCOTT; and SMELSER, NEIL J. 1956 Economy and Society: A Study in the Integration of Economic and Social Theory. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. RICARDO, DAVID (1817) 1962 Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. London: Dent; New York: Dutton. -» A paperback edition was published in 1963 by Irwin. SCHUMPETER, JOSEPH A. (1942) 1950 Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. 3d ed. New York: Harper; London: Allen & Unwin. -> A paperback edition was published in 1962 by Harper. SKINNER, B. F. 1938 The Behavior of Organisms: An Experimental Analysis. New York: Appleton. STEPHEN, LESLIE (1900)1950 The English Utilitarians. London School of Economics and Political Science, Series of Reprints of Scarce Works on Political Economy, Nos. 9-11. 3 vols. London School of Economics and Political Science; Gloucester, Mass.: Smith. -» A sequel to the author's History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century. A detailed study of Bentham and the two Mills. TAYLOR, OVERTON H. 1960 A History of Economic Thought: Social Ideals and Economic Theories From Quesnay to Keynes. New York: McGraw-Hill. WEBER, MAX (1904-1905) 1930 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons, with a foreword by R. H. Tawney. London: Allen & Unwin; New York: Scribner. -> First published in German. The 1930 edition has been reprinted frequently. A paperback edition was published in 1958 by Scribner.
UTILITIES, PUBLIC See REGULATION OF INDUSTRY.
UTILITY In a broad perspective the history of economics emerges as a struggle with the problem of value. The importance of the concept known in modern economics by the name of utility derives precisely from the great light it shed upon this problem from the outset. The term "utility" appeared quite early in the economic literature, but its meaning has shifted continually. Initially it had the same meaning as
its common synonym "usefulness." Thus, Galiani (1750) denned utilitd as "the capacity of a thing to procure us felicity." For Bentham, too, "utility" meant "that property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness . . . to the party whose interest is considered" (The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 1, pp. I f f . ) . It is with Jevons (1871) that utility no longer refers to "an intrinsic quality" of a thing but means "the sum of pleasure and the pain prevented" by its use. Actually, this new meaning slowly began creeping into the economic literature long before Jevons. The switch first occurred in Bentham's works: he used the term both in its old sense and in the sense of the "principle of utility," i.e., the principle of organizing society so as to achieve "the greatest happiness of the greatest number." Bentham was, nevertheless, disturbed by his own license, and late in life the architect of modern utilitarianism lamented, "Utility was an unfortunately chosen word." It is hard to say whether Jevons, who was quite familiar with Bentham's main writings, knew of Bentham's verdict. But by choosing an old term— which even nowadays circulates with its old meaning—for a new and highly subtle concept, Jevons created a permanent source of confusion. Various writers have proposed a change in terminology, but without success. Even "ophelimity," the word expressly coined for this concept by Pareto (1896— 1897), did not prevail over "utility" and is now found only in esoteric works, where it has a different meaning. For Bentham, and to a large extent for Jevons too, "utility" was strongly associated with the pleasure felt during the act of consumption. Gossen (1854) and Edgeworth (1881) reduced everything to this pleasure alone. Actually, with Edgeworth's Mathematical Psychics the hedonistic school of economic behavior reached its climax. Gradually, however, economists came to realize that economic behavior cannot be compared with that of an individual who decides whether or not to have more coffee while drinking coffee. The modern concept of utility was worked out by Jennings (1855), who, curiously, arrived at it after an excursion in psychophysical parallelism far more extensive than that undertaken by Edgeworth. Jennings pointed out that in choice the individual is guided by expected pleasure, which in turn is based on the remembrance of the pleasures actually experienced in the past; but he called this expected pleasure "value." In truth, what we now call utility theory need not require any shift from the old meaning of
UTILITY "utility." As early as 1833 Lloyd stated its basic principles, with perfect clarity, in the old terminology: The utility [usefulness] of corn is the same after an abundant harvest as in time of famine. . . . The term value [utility], therefore, does not express a. quality inherent in a commodity, [but] a feeling of the mind, and is variable with the variations of the external circumstances which can influence that feeling, without any variation of the intrinsic qualities of the commodity which is the object of it. ([1833] 1927, pp. 174, 181) Even Jevons wrote, "value in use = total utility," and Pareto, too, admitted that "utility" is another word for "value in use." No doubt "value in use" fits better the modern concept of utility. It is curious, then, that after Aristotle set forth the concept of value in use (see below), it took more than twenty centuries for utility to become the basis of a revolutionary theory in economics. The quantitative scaffold, which now constitutes both the pride and the burden of modern economics, was erected, however, not on the utility concept alone but on the "principle of decreasing marginal utility." Simply stated, this principle is that each additional unit of the same commodity increases utility by a decreasing magnitude. It obviously implies that pleasure, nay, expected pleasure, can be measured just as length or weight can. The numberless preutilitarian economists must not be blamed for being as incapable of thinking up this idea as we are now reluctant to part with it. Historical background. Long and tortuous though the intellectual struggle with the problem of value has been, a preliminary survey reveals only a few truly important landmarks. The first, laid by the philosophers of ancient Greece, is the idea that two distinct elements are involved in the problem of value: an intrinsic quality of the object of value and a subjective evaluation by the user. But the common belief that only monistic explanation befits genuine science prompted one student after another to seek a single cause for value. Thus, the problem took the form of the famous epistemological puzzle: the pain must be either in the needle or in the sentient being, not in both. And since the thought that pleasure and pain can be measured seemed extravagant, economic thought was dominated for centuries by commodity fetishism: "the value of a thing lies in the thing itself," as we find it frankly stated by J. B. Say. This orientation led to the second landmark: value is determined by the amount of labor crystallized in the commodity. Some writers still played with the idea that there is, nonetheless, a subjective element in value, but any hint in this direction crumbled against the
237
"paradox of value," known even to the poet Pindar. The paradox is that many very useful commodities, such as water, have a low exchange value or none at all, whereas much less useful ones, such as diamonds, have a high exchange value. Perhaps nothing illustrates the complexity of the problem of value better than the fact that although the paradox once constituted the greatest obstacle on the road to utility theory, the only light on it comes from this very theory. The characteristic ferment of the Enlightenment produced a reaction against commodity fetishism, which—as happens with most reactions—swung to the opposite extreme: "A thing does not have value because, as is assumed, it costs; but it costs because it has value [in use]," as Condillac ([1776] 1948, p. 246) was to summarize the position representing the third landmark. The fourth landmark, the most important of all, is utility theory itself. Upon it the great synthesis of general economic equilibrium is now based: in value, utility and scarcity (both in their modern meanings) are linked together through the whole economic process. But the prevalent belief to the contrary, not all issues pertaining to value or to consumer behavior are thereby elucidated (see the last section of this article, "A critique of utility"). Even though the philosophers of ancient Greece never undertook a systematic study of the economic problems beyond oikonomia ("housekeeping"), Plato's Dialogues contain a remarkable analysis of pleasure and pain (e.g., Protagoras, Gorgias, and especially Philebus) and are studded with other ideas on a par with or even superior to many modern works on utility. Plato argued that life is a "juxtaposition" of pleasure and pain: these alone form the object of man's choice. Centuries later Bentham was to open his Principles of Morals and Legislation with exactly the same thought: "Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure" (The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 1, p. 1). In an equally modern vein, Plato (Philebus 21) proclaimed that if you were unable "to calculate on future pleasure, your life would be the life, not of a man, but of an oyster or pulmo marinus." And again we find Bentham insisting that "all men [even madmen] calculate" with pleasures and pains. The legacy of Aristotle also is not confined to the basic distinction between value in use and value in exchange (Politica 1257a6-14). Regrettably, Aristotle's most important thoughts on the relation between value and prices are crowded into a few pages of Ethica Nicomachea (1132a-1133b). There we find the fundamental idea that underlies both
238
UTILITY
the labor and the utility theories of value in modern times: since commodities must be compared in order to be exchanged for each other, every commodity must possess in some definite degree a measurable quality common to all. There is, then, a unit by which this common quality, value, can be measured. Most interesting of all is that Aristotle goes on to say, first, that it is "[social] need" that renders all commodities commensurable and, second, that the exchange value of a commodity is proportional to the work necessary to produce it. This led him to conclude—an argument repeated by Marx—that exchange cannot increase value: after a "just exchange," everyone must come out without gain or loss. Coming from one of the intellectual giants of all time, this fallacy maintained an unrelenting grip on economic thought for centuries. Fifteen centuries after the golden period of the Athenian Academy came to an end, interest in the analysis of the economic life of society was revived by the Scholastics, who found Aristotle's just exchange and just remuneration perfectly congenial to their Christian ideals. In the end, however, the Scholastics broke away from the normative viewpoint to ask, not what value should be, but what it is. The final position is explicitly crystallized by St. Antoninus. The value of an article rests upon (a) its comparative quality with other similar articles, (£>) its scarcity, and (c) its complacibilitas —a concept equivalent to that introduced later by Galiani and Bentham. The publication in 1750 of Galiani's treatise on money marks the beginning of the subjectivist reaction already mentioned. Galiani's psychological approach led him to the important observation that value is "an idea of the balance between the possession of one thing and that of another in the mind of an individual" ([1750] 1915, p. 27), a thought which adumbrates the basis of the modern theory of choice. But his apologists to the contrary, Galiani did not come close to perceiving the principle of decreasing marginal utility. Instead, Galiani touched upon some ideas that made history in the hands of later writers. He anticipated the classical school by arguing that the only invariable standard of value is man himself. Equally interesting is Galiani's thesis, which bears upon a recent idea of Friedman and Savage ([1948] 1952, pp. 87 ff.), that the desire for social distinction—rank, titles, honors, nobility, authority—is stronger than that for luxuries and that the desire for luxuries is stronger than the desire of the hungry for food. Another valuable contribution along the same line is a little-known essay written by Turgot in
1768 but not published until 1808. Turgot was the first economist to relate explicitly the consumer's behavior to choice and also to see that in a barter each party values what he gets more than he values what he gives. But Turgot still could not free himself completely from the Aristotelian tradition, for he went on to argue that in a free barter no party can gain more than the other. The pragmatic reason why utility theory constitutes an important chapter of modern economics is that it greatly simplifies demand theory. Unfortunately, in their groping for a solution to the problem of value the early economists were handicapped by an entirely inadequate conception of demand as some invariant to price. The idea that demand is an invariant quantity goes back to Montanari, who in the 1680s argued that a commodity is abundant, not when there is in fact a large quantity of it in an absolute sense, but when there is plenty of it relative to the need, esteem, and desire people have for it (see 1687). Later on we find demand conceived as an invariant expenditure. This is most clearly expressed by Cantillon: "A pound of Beef will be in value to a piece of money pretty nearly as all the Beef offered for sale in the Market is to all the money brought thither to buy Beef" ([1755] 1931, p. 118), a fallacy that for a long time passed as an economic truism. J. B. Say built upon it his famous theorem that a rise in the price of a commodity is in direct proportion to the demand and in inverse proportion to the supply of the commodity. The post-Scholastic writers were partly justified in relating demand to an invariant. On the whole, economic life in Europe remained both stagnant and at a low level until late in the eighteenth century; for the overwhelming majority of people, expenditure covered only basic needs and consequently had an invariable pattern. It was only normal, therefore, for these writers to generalize from what applied to most consumers in their own society. But the view that demand consists of an invariant to price survived even after historical conditions no longer justified it, for example, in the writings of Adam Smith and Karl Marx. The reason for the survival is, no doubt, that any invariant element simplifies matters immensely. The usual tendency to steer away from complicating ideas may also explain why the law that the smaller the crop, the greater its money value, formulated by Gregory King in 1696, made no history—which lack of impact was rightly deplored by Jevons. No excuse can be offered, however, for the failure of the early writers to discriminate between value in use and value in exchange. Adam Smith therefore gets the glory of rediscovering Aristotle's
UTILITY dichotomy. But no sooner was this dichotomy recognized than classical economists discarded altogether the concept of value in use, on the ground that it was unscientific. Smith and, more skillfully, Ricardo argued that only the labor necessary to produce a commodity constitutes as objective and invariable a standard for value as the yardstick for length. Ricardo scorned the idea that the propensities of the individual may have anything to do with value. To be sure, classical economists admitted that value in use is "absolutely essential" to exchangeable value; but by barring from economics the subjective side of value, they closed the door to any progress in the analysis of demand. For them, the problem of why consumers do not spend their incomes entirely on bread or entirely on pearls simply did not arise. This is why J. S. Mill could say, "Happily, there is nothing in the laws of value which remains for the present or for any future writer to clear up; the theory of the subject is complete" ([1848] 1961, p. 436). Although ideas similar to Gregory King's appeared now and then in the English literature, the notion of "demand at a price" as a general schedule was not reached until 1870, by Fleeming Jenkin. In France, where the classical viewpoint failed to monopolize economic thought, Cournot had already come out with the general law of demand in 1838, and six years later Dupuit (1844), an engineer, not only formulated the principle of decreasing marginal utility for a commodity but also derived from it a synthesis of utility and demand. That the three authors just mentioned were in varying degrees familiar with the mathematical tool is not mere accident. But one of the most convincing proofs of the power of mathematics in clarifying or solving economic problems is the fact that the first major breakthrough in the problem of value was achieved a hundred years before Cournot's theory of demand, by two mathematicians, Gabriel Cramer and Daniel Bernoulli, and a natural scientist versed in mathematics, Leclerc de Buffon. The traditional economists' lack of familiarity with mathematics does not suffice, however, to explain why they did not learn of the discovery. Even nonmathematical formulations of the principle, subsequently made by its rediscoverers—Bentham, Lloyd, and Jennings—failed to attract much attention from British economists. No doubt the shadows of Smith and Ricardo were still strong enough to cover that cast by Bentham. The fate of Gossen's Entwicklung (1854) provides an even stronger proof that in social science new ideas must also suit the temper of the age in order to be accepted. This splendid work—which,
239
as Jevons admitted, completely anticipated his own —was wholly ignored by the German economists, who in those times were all of the historical school. The principle of decreasing marginal utility Simple and transparent though the usual formulation of the principle of decreasing marginal utility seems, only an axiomatic analysis can reveal all that this formulation leaves unsaid or unsolved. The elements involved in the axioms, to be presented and discussed one by one, require little elaboration. Following Jevons, we may define a commodity as an object whose use yields utility (produces pleasure or prevents pain) to at least some individual. The axioms are as follows: Axiom A (Bentham-Gossen axiom): Every commodity is a quantum, i.e., any instance of it is a definite multiple of some arbitrarily chosen unit. Another way of saying the same thing is that every commodity is cardinally measurable. It was Bentham who first insisted upon this condition explicitly. The same idea appeared in Gossen's writings and, later, in Menger's (1871). Most economists, however, have followed Jevons in ignoring the issue of the cardinality of commodities. Yet the issue is vital for any quantitative principle in economics, not only for the one discussed here. Axiom B (Bentham's axiom) : For any given individual, the utility of any commodity is a cardinally measurable variable. This is certainly the most critical assumption-ever adopted in economics. Actually, Bentham assumed much more, namely, that there is a standard of utility common to all individuals. Without this common standard he could not possibly have formulated his famous utility principle: "It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong." In an unpublished manuscript, Bentham's skepticism did show itself in the admission that "one man's happiness will never be another man's happiness: a gain to a man is no gain to another: you might as well pretend to add twenty apples to twenty pears." In one place he even denounced the axiom of cardinally measurable utility, but like countless others, he argued that this is the voice of "indifference or incapacity," explaining later that even though the "addibility of the happiness of different individuals" is groundless, without it "all political reasoning is at a stand." Gossen, too, recognized that no method of measuring pleasure is available and expressed the hope that one might be discovered some day. But at the same time, he remarked that all the new theory
240
UTILITY
needs is the comparability of utilities, a thought found again only in later writings. Jevons quoted Bentham extensively, but except for a categorical denial of interpersonal comparison of utility, he added nothing new. Walras (1874-1877), on the other hand, set a lasting pattern in the way he belittled the issue raised by the utility measure. Edgeworth, however, defended the cardinal measurability of utility with unsurpassed fervor. Profoundly influenced by the discoveries of Fechner and Weber in experimental psychology — of which Jevons and Walras seem to have had no knowledge — Edgeworth argued that pleasure is measurable in terms of its atoms. Bentham had already alluded to a "moral thermometer," but Edgeworth is the first economist to believe earnestly in the possibility of measuring utility by a "hedonimeter." This extreme position failed to impress his contemporaries, for by then economists were ready for the idea that utility is not identical with pleasure. Unwittingly, for reasons of simplicity, Gossen and Jevons worked with another axiom, stated explicitly only by Walras: Axiom C •. The utility of a commodity to an individual depends solely upon the amount of that commodity in his possession.
This axiom proclaims the independence of utilities. From the above axioms, it follows that the utility of a given commodity for a given individual is a function, f/(x), of the amount x. Jevons called t/(x) total utility. The choice was rather unfortunate because the term evokes the utility, (1)
, xn) t/ 2 (X 2 )
t/ n (X n ),
derived from all commodities in the possession of the individual. But Jevons wanted to emphasize the distinction between t/(x) and the utility increment, ALT = U(x + Ax) — t/(x), produced by an additional dose Ax of the given commodity. Jevons used "degree of utility" for the ratio At// Ax Quite reasonably, he assumed that for a continuous commodity this ratio tends toward a limit, t/'(x), if Ax tends toward zero, or, as is said in mathematics, that t/(x) has a derivative function. Jevons referred to U'(x') as "the final degree of utility" of the amount x; Walras used rarete; Pareto, "elementary ophelimity." The equivalent German word now in use, Grenznutzen, was introduced by Wieser (1889); initially, however, the term meant exactly what it says: use (not utility) at the margin. Not happy with Jevons' terminology, Wicksteed, in his Alphabet of Economic Science, proposed
"marginal effect" for At/, and "marginal effectiveness" or "marginal utility" for l/'(x). "Marginal" has replaced "final" ever since Marshall, too, adopted it, but Marshall used the term to denote indifferently any of the concepts mentioned above. To avoid the ambiguity now current, we shall denote At/ by "marginal utility increment" and At//Ax by "average marginal utility," and reserve "marginal utility" solely for t/'(x). The principle of decreasing marginal utility can now be stated as follows: Given a sequence of equal doses of the same commodity, the marginal utility increment decreases with each successive dose; ultimately it becomes negative. The usual argument by which most discoverers of this principle justified it will appear in a better light in the discussion below. Here we need only note that the principle does not work in all cases. The second cocktail or the second sip of coffee may yield greater satisfaction than the first. Moreover, some commodities may yield no satisfaction until their amount exceeds a certain level. All commodities indispensable to life belong to this category, but the example of fishing for pleasure proves that there are other cases in point. From the assumption of a decreasing marginal utility increment, it follows that the average marginal utility, At//Ax, of a dose also decreases if x increases. And since the amount of a dose is arbitrary, for a continuous commodity we can make Ax tend to zero. We then obtain the following axiom: Axiom D: The marginal utility of a commodity, U'(x'), decreases as x increases; ultimately it becomes negative.
The first part of this axiom is currently the most used formulation of the principle of decreasing marginal utility. The logical content of the preceding axioms can be represented directly by some elementary diagrams. The case of a "regular" commodity, for which t/(0) = 0 but t/(x) is positive and finite in the neighborhood of x = 0, will be considered first. In figures la and Ib the amounts of the given commodity in, say, pounds are measured on the axis Ox. In Figure la the ordinate represents (total) utility, measured in units usually referred to as "utils"; in Figure Ib it represents marginal utility, measured in utils per pound. In accord with the last part of the principle of decreasing marginal utility, beyond S marginal utility is negative. At S utility is maximum; OS represents the saturation amount. With Jevons and Menger, we may also think of a point of "suffocation," R, beyond which utility itself becomes negative.
UTILITY
K
a" A"
o
\a'
A
b" r,ir ^X b' B"
a
b B
S\
Figure 7 fa
In Figure la the average marginal utility of an increment Ax = AB is represented by AU/&X = B'L/A'L, that is, by the slope of A'B'. And since by definition U' is the limit of A£//A;r, the marginal utility of the amount OA is the slope of the tangent AT. Turning to Figure Ib, we let AB be divided into a certain number of very small equal doses, hx = Aa. Because &U/hx approaches U' as Ax tends to zero, AU/A.r is approximately equal to AA" — U'. In the first approximation, therefore, the area of the rectangle AA"a"a = AA" X Aa = U' X &x — At/. Hence, the area under the step-line A"a"a'b"b'c"B" approximates the increase in utility corresponding to AB. If Aac tends to zero, the stepline tends to the curve A"a'b'B"; hence, the area under this curve represents the utility of the increment AB. In the special case of a regular commodity—considered in figures la and Ib—the (total) utility of OB is the area under the curve KA"B". The principle of decreasing marginal utility is expressed in Figure Ib by the downward slope of
241
the curve KA"S and in Figure la by the decreasing slope of the tangent AT as x increases. Intuitively, the last property is equivalent to the upward convexity of OA'B'R. In mathematical terms, the principle is tantamount to saying that U" (the derivative of U', i.e., the second derivative of U) is negative: U" < 0 is the simplest condition for the upward convexity of U. By a faulty argument Pareto concluded that, in addition, U'" > 0; this means that the marginal utility curve U' is convex downward. But aside from the curious tendency of almost everyone to draw this curve so, no ground seems to exist for accepting Pareto's inequality. The two representations just described are not always wholly equivalent: one can always derive Figure Ib from Figure la, but not the converse. The total utility curve can be lowered or raised by any amount whatever; the slopes of its tangents and, hence, the marginal utility curve are not affected thereby; to put it mathematically, the derivative U'(x} determines the function U(x) except for an arbitrary additive constant. Only for a regular commodity is this constant determined, because we already know that the utility curve must pass through the origin. Actually, mathematics tells us further that the function U corresponding to a given U' may be infinite. The point is illustrated by the case of U'(x) — a/x, the famous formula used by Bernoulli to represent the marginal utility of wealth (see below). The area under this curve (i.e., the total utility) for any amount of the commodity is infinite. Imagine that the axis Ox in Figure la is moved down to infinity, and you have a simpler illustration of infinite utility. In all these cases, the level of utility can be visualized as a bottomless ocean; the wave on top can, nevertheless, be seen by a navigator and described by the curve of marginal utility. The idea of an infinite utility is not a mere analytical nicety. Up to the minimum of subsistence, say, x0, the utility of a basic food item is that of life itself and, hence, must be infinite; the utility of any amount greater than that minimum also must be infinite. To circumvent the ensuing analytical difficulties, it has been suggested that we "take life for granted" and measure utility above the level of subsistence. Even so, the area under the marginal utility curve, KS, in Figure 2Z? may be infinite; only if it is not, can the truncated utility be represented by a curve like A0A'jR in Figure 2a. The foregoing observations show that the principle of decreasing marginal utility does not require that utility should be cardinally measurable (Bentham's axiom); only its differences must be so. The Bentham-Gossen axiom can also be made
242
UTILITY
Figure 2a
U'
o
s\ Figure 2b
weaker in this respect. However, neither axiom can be weakened further. In step with the conceptual framework of this section, any stamp collection must have a definite utility. Yet no basis exists for saying that the utility of, say, the fifth stamp is smaller than that of the fourth. A stamp collection is not a multiple of some unit stamp—it can be arranged in any order we please. This proves that the principle of decreasing marginal utility loses all meaning without some cardinality. To prove the same thing for Bentham's axiom, it suffices to suppose that even though the individual can feel that utility increases or decreases, he is unable to compare the utility increments of different doses. Curiously, the first quantitative law ever proposed for utility was not the principle of decreasing marginal utility but the principle of the decreasing average utility—set forth by Gabriel Cramer around 1730. The two principles, it should be noted, are not equivalent. If we bear in mind that the average utility of OA is the slope of OA', Figure 2a immediately shows that the marginal principle does not
entail the average principle. The converse is proved by the case in which the total utility for the first three doses is 10, 17, and 25 utils. Even for a modern student, the idea that a man does not become ten times happier if he becomes ten times richer is far more transparent than the idea expressed by the principle of decreasing marginal utility. True, Cramer's principle cannot work at all if utility is infinite. But since such a consideration was foreign to the early writers, it cannot explain why, in spite of its simplicity, only very few came to think of Cramer's principle, and especially why the marginal prevailed over the average principle from the outset. The explanation is that economists felt, however faintly, that man's economic life is like that of a navigator on high seas, for whom the depth of the ocean, whether infinite or finite, is immaterial. In other words, they somehow intuited the characteristic orientation of modern economics—utility theory must be a theory of marginal utility, not of average utility nor of total utility itself. Recent extensions have not denied the justice of this view, and in the end it seems not only that "utility" was an unfortunately chosen term but also that the concept was not needed at all. Officially, the edifice erected by Gossen, Jevons, and Walras for the theory of value was abandoned quite early. Yet everyone continued to speak the lar.guage of utility and to resort now and then to the old framework, for—as we shall see in the following sections—many notions and issues are set in stronger light within that simple framework than through the technically complex apparatus of modern extensions. Utility and value Which utility coordinate truly represents "value" has been the object of considerable disagreement, not only between the classical and the utility schools but also between the members of the latter. Clearly, if the sense in which value is used is not specified, the problem has no determinate answer. But if it is value in use that one has in mind, there is no doubt that the value of an amount x is its utility, 17 (x). The case of exchange value is more intricate. The difficulty stems from the fact—first pointed out by Jevons—that the concept of value in exchange as understood by Aristotle and the classical economists has no direct relation to either total or marginal utility. In that sense the exchange value of a unit of C± is the amount of some other commodity, C*, for which it can be exchanged on the market at the prevailing exchange rate. Although in the ultimate analysis this exchange rate
UTILITY is related to the utilities that all commodities separately have for each trader, it is a market datum, not one pertaining to the individual. Jevons (1871) therefore was justified in referring to this market datum as purchasing power, instead of exchange value. Obviously, the purchasing power of C1 has a different measure according to the particular commodity against which it is exchanged. However, as Marx (1867-1879) first insisted, with a wealth of detail, on the same competitive market the only exchange ratios that can prevail are those that render the purchasing power of any commodity equivalent in any exchange. The consequence is that the purchasing power of any commodity can be expressed either in terms of some arbitrarily chosen commodity (which need not be gold or silver) or in terms of some money of account representing general purchasing power. The fact that most economists have held fast to the Aristotelian terminology may be due to a common fallacy, particularly conspicuous in the work of Walras. The fallacy is the argument that marginal utility "is the cause of [the Aristotelian] value in exchange" because price ratios are proportional to the marginal utilities of the respective commodities for all traders. This is to ignore that it is the way a competitive market functions that accounts for the proportionality, not vice versa. Besides, even in a pure exchange market the relationship between marginal utilities and exchange values is not as strict as we have it from Walras. The exchange value of a commodity for which some people have absolutely no use—a not uncommon situation—should be nil if the relationship held strictly. Marginal utility is connected with valuation in exchange, not in the impersonal meaning "exchange value" had for Aristotle, but in a purely subjective one. For the individual who contemplates exchanging one commodity against another, only the balance of the utilities lost and gained counts. In exchange, therefore, the individual's "esteem" of the last dose Ax is U' Ax. Per unit of C x , this esteem is U'(x'), but "exchange value of a unit of C" describes the concept better than "esteem." And since all available doses of a commodity stand undifferentiated vis-a-vis the satisfaction they yield together, we reach the conclusion that xU'(x^) measures the value in exchange of the entire amount x. This manner of bringing to the surface the relation between marginal utility and value is the hallmark of Jevons' teaching, as well as that of Menger. But the champion of the thesis that economic value
243
can have no other measure than xU'(x) is Wieser. Perhaps he wanted to teach not only that "final degree of utility determines value"—as Jevons did —but also that utility (value in use) plays no direct role in this determination. In the end Wieser struck a more acceptable chord by saying that "value in use measures utility; exchange value measures a combination of [marginal] utility and purchasing power" ([1889] 1956, p. 57). Utility, money, and exchange There are two pure types of money used by analytical economics to epitomize two main attributes of actual money. The first type, Walras' numeraire, corresponds to the situation where one ordinary commodity serves also as money. The second type, now generally known as Marshall's money (1890), typifies the opposite extreme, where money consists solely of pecuniary tokens of no direct use whatever. To the holder such money represents only some general purchasing power. Whichever is the case, from any amount of money, m, spent on some commodity, C, at the price p, the individual derives an amount of utility, V(m,p). The corresponding formula is almost a tautology: V(m,p) = U(x), where U is the utility of C and x is equal to m/p. It becomes a full tautology if C is the numeraire: V(m) = U(ra). But all this is of no use if U is infinite. However, regardless of whether U is infinite or not, we are on solid ground if, instead of V(m,p), we consider V'(m,p), "the marginal utility of money through C." Since Ara = pAx, the average marginal utility of Am is A[//(pAx), or (AL//Ax)/p. At the limit, this yields (2)
V'(ra,p) = U'(x)/p = U'(m/p)/p.
With the aid of this formula, we can easily see how to construct the curve representing V'(ra,p) if L/'(x) is given and also how to show the effect of a change in p on the same curve. Equilibrium of the consumer. The problem of the consumer's equilibrium consists of how an individual described by our theory is going to distribute his budget money, ra0, among the various commodities, Ci, available at fixed prices, pi, if it is also assumed that he economizes, i.e., strives to get the highest possible satisfaction from his budget money. A very elementary solution is obtained with the aid of two graphical devices imagined by Gossen. The first device applies to the case of two commodities. In Figure 3, V'^ra), short for V'^ra,^), is represented by A^. The curve A'2S'2 represents V' 2 (m) when m is measured in reverse from M toward O, and OM = m0 is the money pos-
244
UTILITY
trigO
b
B
M
Sx
Figure 3
sessed by the individual. Let A1S1 and A 2 S 2 intersect at B'. The utility corresponding to budget B, where W! = OB is spent on Ci and m, = MB is spent on C 2 , is greater than that of any other budget. Clearly, for budget b the utility is smaller by the amount measured by the area B'a'b'. Hence, B is the optimal budget. (Similar conclusions apply if A1S1 and A 2 S 2 do not intersect.) Figure 3 also shows, in a simple and direct fashion, what Turgot first pointed out: even though exchange does not create objects of utility, uncoerced exchange always increases the trader's utility. For if our individual possesses OM of C^ and is offered budget b as the sole alternative to not trading at all, he will freely accept b, provided that the area under £>'A2 is greater than that under a'A. If the latter is finite and the former infinite, he will accept any b. Whatever the case, the difference between the two areas represents the trader's gain. The other trader, too, must gain, for otherwise he would not offer to the first the choice of b. The just exchange of Aristotle corresponds to the case where the trader's gain is nil, which can never happen if trade is uncoerced. Also, if the
B
aM
Sl
b
Figure 4
c
S'
prices are PI and p2, nothing can prevent a consumer in a free market from choosing B. The gain he derives from being able to buy C2 in addition to Ci is shown by the area B'A2A. This is all the gain if Cj is the numeraire. But in the case of Marshall's money, the whole gain is the aggregate utility of B, that is, the sum of the areas under A 3 B' and A'2B'. In Gossen's second graphical device, money is again measured on the horizontal axis (Figure 4). For every level of the ordinate, we add the corresponding abscissas of the curves representing V;(w) and V 2 (m), obtaining the curve A^S". On this diagram we can read directly any optimal budget. If ra0 = OM, for instance, the optimal budget is ra, = OB, m2 = BM, for which the marginal utilities of money, V[(m~) and V;(m), are equal to OP in both uses. If C3 also is available, we can add horizontally A,A,S" and the curve representing V' 3 (m). The resulting curve, A^A2A^", has the same convenient property: for m(, = Oc we can read directly the optimal budget, ml = Oa, m., = ab, m3 = be, for which the indirect marginal utilities of money are equal to Ow. We can extend the curve A1A2A3A4 • • • for any number of commodities. It is with the aid of simple diagrams such as these that Gossen proved the fundamental proposition of consumer's equilibrium, in a form found elsewhere only in much later works: "Man maximizes his total life pleasure if he distributes his entire money income, E, among the various enjoyments . . . so that the last atom of money spent on each single pleasure yields the same amount of pleasure." The curve AJAOA3A4 • • • also has another important property. Take the case of m,, = OM as an illustration. A comparison of Figure 4 with Figure 3 shows immediately that the area under the curve AjA.Q represents the aggregate utility of the optimal allocation of m(> - OM. We may denote this aggregate utility for any m by W(ra), or by W(m, Pi,p 2 , • • • • , p n ) if we wish to remind ourselves that this utility depends on prices as well. And since the area under the curve A 1 A 2 A 3 A 4 • • • represents W(m), the ordinate of the curve itself represents W'(ra), i.e., the marginal utility of m if spent optimally and prices remain constant. The idea that W(m) measures the utility of money goes back to Walras; as a hint, it is also found in Jevons. It is, however, with Marshall that it acquired the important significance it now has for our topic. Within any analytical framework that assumes cardinal measurability of utility and ignores uncertainty, the idea is not a mere analytical convenience but is intrinsically legitimate. In his early writings Pareto argued that since
UTILITY Marshall's money does not satisfy directly any human need, it cannot have a utility in the same sense milk has. But if we were to confine the concept of utility to commodities that satisfy some need directly, a great number of consumer goods —beef, fish, eggs, wool, etc.—would no longer have a utility. Besides, the utility of milk through its use in, say, an eggnog would also have to be ignored. Another objection to equating W(m) with utility is that its measure is based upon the assumption that the individual always chooses the optimal budget, that he always economizes rationally. Yet, without assuming that the individual somehow calculates on all types of pleasures, we cannot attribute any utility to potatoes either. The utility of potatoes, too, corresponds to an optimal "potato budget," i.e., to an optimal distribution among various uses-—boiling, baking, etc.—determined by given transformation rates. The case of Marshall's money is completely similar. Milk, which has both direct and indirect uses, illustrates the case of Walras' numeraire. There is finally the well-known objection against any tool of partial analysis: since W(rrz) depends upon prices, the notion of money utility has "meaning only after the [general] equilibrium has been attained" (Schultz 1938, p. 34). Yet, for consumer theory W(ra) is as indispensable a tool as total cost is for the theory of production. The real difficulty of the concept of the utility of money comes from an entirely different direction: actual money is legal tender for future purchases, the prices and the utilities of which are subject to pure uncertainty. Replacing the utilities of all such purchases by a single utility—the utility of money hoarded, or encaisse desiree, as Walras called it—is a tempting thought. But such a utility is beset with all the difficulties inherent in the elusive nature of uncertainty itself. This is the main reason why we need a separate theory of money proper. The diagram of Figure 4 shows neatly why W'(ra) should not be confused with the marginal utility of the numeraire C l 5 which is represented by A t Si. Yet, in the early works this difference is not sharply marked, perhaps not even suspected. The Walrasian tradition of considering only the case of a numeraire accounts for other omissions as well. In the case of Marshall's money, a proportional variation of m and all prices obviously affects neither the optimal budget nor the utility of money. Hence, the optimal purchases (the demand functions) and the money utility depend only on the ratios pi/m, and consequently they can be written respectively as follows: Xi(pjm, p^/m, • • • ) and W(pl/m, p2/m, • • •). From equation (2) above, it
245
also follows that the marginal utility of money can be written as W' = w(p^/m, p2/m, • • • )/ni. As great a simplification as these forms represent, economists did not think of them until very recently. Naturally, if one commodity proper is used as money, there can be no proportional variation of money and all prices. Besides, in the case of a numeraire, the form W(l/m,p2/m, • • • ) represents no simplification over W(m, p2,ps, • • • )• Utility and demand. From Figure 4 it can be seen that the optimal budget includes no commodity for which V'^O) is smaller than W'(m0) and that the indirect marginal utility of a commodity included in the budget is equal to W(rn (1 ). Consequently, the complete system of the optimal distribution of budget m () among the expenditures m, o , • • • , mn is ml + m, + • • • + mn — m0 ;
(3)
V! (m-,) = W'(m 0 ), for m, * 0; m, * 0 if and only if V;/(0) > W'(m 0 ).
With the aid of ( 2 ) , this yields the correct Walrasian form of the system for the demands plxl (4)
pnxn
for x-t * 0 if and only if U'i(0)/pi > W'(ra 0 ).
Employing elaborate mathematics, Pareto (1906) and Slutsky (1915) have derived from (4) a series of propositions regarding the change in the demand Xi following a change either in one of the prices or in money. All these propositions can be established directly, with the aid of the elementary diagrams used above. For example, Figure 4 shows immediately that an increase in money increases the expenditure on each commodity. The price effect (i.e., the change in the demand for a commodity due to a change in the price of the same or another commodity) can be determined by using an idea implicitly used by Marshall and explicitly stated by Pareto : when an individual contemplates spending a dollar on any of the commodities G! , C2 , • • • , CL , i < n, he compares the resulting utility with the utility which the dollar would have if spent on all other commodities, C<+i , Ci+2 , • • - , € „ . The money spent only on these last commodities appears, therefore, as a commodity with its own utility. Let W((m) be the marginal utility of money when spent on all commodities but G! (assumed not to be the numeraire). In Figure 5 let AS represent V'^rra) and CD represent Wj^m), the latter curve being drawn with the abscissas reversed. If m() = OM can be spent on all
246
UTILITY
M
B S
S'
Figure 5
commodities, the optimal budget is B: OB = ra, is spent on C^ and BM is spent optimally on the other commodities. The marginal utility of money is W'(m}=bB. Now, if the price of C: alone increases, the new V'^ra) is represented by A'S'. Hence, in the situation of the diagram the marginal utility of money, as well as the expenditure on C 15 increases. But since c'd/cd measures the relative increase in price, this expenditure increases proportionally less than the price. Therefore, the demand for C, decreases. If CD happens to pass through K, then everything is left unchanged except that the demand for C t decreases. If CD cuts AS above K, the marginal utility of money and the expenditure on C, decrease. Table 1, in which i ^ 1, summarizes the various effects of an increase in pl. The fourth column establishes the Cournot-Marshall law of demand for the case of independent utilities—that an increase in the price of a commodity leads to a reduction in the consumer's demand for the same commodity. On the other hand, the last column shows that even in this most simple case the frequent assertion that an increase in the price of Ca increases the demand for Cj is incorrect. Table 1 — Effects of an increase in pl CD cuts AS below K CD cuts AS at K CD cuts AS above K
W(m)
m,
+ 0 -
0 -f
Two singularities have a special importance for the next topic. The first is the case where AS and A'S' coincide for any price. In this case, U\(x^) must have unit elasticity, and V\(m} = a/m, where a is a constant. As is easily seen from Figure 5, the demand for Cj is also of unit elasticity. Moreover, the marginal utility of money is constant with respect to pl. The second singularity arises if CD
becomes a horizontal straight line before it intersects AS. In this case, an increase in m0 leaves the expenditure m l 5 as well as the marginal utility of money, unchanged. The marginal utility of money also remains constant for moderate variations of Pi. What this singularity, which bears on the notion of the constant marginal utility of money, implies is simple yet important. From Figure 4 it is immediately clear that the marginal utility of one commodity (say, C n ) included in the budget must be constant. This condition exposes two commonly ignored points: first, that U'n = constant does not necessarily imply W'(ra) = constant; and second, that normally W'(TO) = constant can be true only if ra exceeds a certain value, say, ra*. Money as a measure of utility In retrospect it seems quite natural that the idea of measuring utility by money should have occurred to an engineer, Dupuit, and also to an economist, such as Marshall, whose highest ambition was to keep theory as close as possible to "the practice of everyday life." Although the idea is mentioned also by Jevons, who may have been Marshall's source of inspiration, only Dupuit and Marshall developed it into a practical procedure. Their points of departure are identical. For Dupuit, ". . . the measure of the utility of an object [is] the maximum sacrifice [in money] which each consumer would be willing to make in order to acquire the object" ([1844] 1952, p. 89). Similarly, Marshall asserts, ". . . [the money] which a person would be just willing to pay for any satisfaction rather than go without it, is ... the 'economic measure' of the satisfaction to him" ([1879] 1930, p. 20). In the entire economic science there is perhaps no idea more transparent to the uninitiated than the Dupuit-Marshall principle; but, also, none illustrates the contradictions often inherent in such transparency better than this very principle when interpreted with full rigor. Let the maximum amounts of money a given individual is willing to sacrifice for each additional dose Ax be p1 Ax, p.. Ax, • • • . On the ground that each additional dose serves a less important need, Dupuit asserted that p{ > p» > • • • . In other words, he took it for granted that utility is measured by money. Marshall, however, strove to present this decreasing sequence as a consequence of Jevons' marginal utility principle. But both authors argued that if the price is, say, p-2, the individual would buy exactly two doses: to buy only one dose would be not to take full advantage of the offer; to buy three doses would be to pay more for the third than its maximum worth to him. Knowing, then, that
UTILITY
position fully. While for some Marshall's reasoning became an article of faith, others challenged it repeatedly. A cause celebre thus emerged in the economic annals, with Pareto opening the debates. Pareto argued (1896-1897) that Marshall was correct only if the marginal utility of "the commodity serving as money" is constant and, curiously, maintained that in the first approximation one may take it to be so. If V;(ra) = k = constant, then W{ (m) = k for ra > ra* regardless of whether Cn is numeraire or not. Hence, the optimal distribution of m0 between C, and all other commodities is given by the system
\
(5)
o
247
a, a. Figure 6
at the price pn the individual will buy n doses, we can represent the individual's demand schedule by a sequence of points. A continuous demand curve (Figure 6) is obtained by making A.% tend toward zero. In this case the utility of, say, the second dose is the area under the arc b^b.,, not that of the rectangle a,cb.,a2, but the difference (the area b-iCsb.j) is of the second order of magnitude. Areas in Figure 6 represent money. Thus, Optb4a4 = p^ x Oa4 represents the total money the individual would freely spend on the amount Oa4; the area under the curve Pb^ represents the maximum sacrifice this amount is worth in money to him. The picture is similar to that of Figure Ib, and the distinction between the meanings of the two areas recalls the earlier discussion of value. Also the "relative utility" of Dupuit or the "consumer's surplus" of Marshall, measured by the triangular area Pptb4, recalls the trader's gain. Yet the difference between the Dupuit-Marshall scheme and the utility representation is fundamental. In the case of utility there is absolutely no difference between one util and the next, whereas in the Dupuit-Marshall scheme the utility of the money that the individual has to pay for each additional dose must always increase, for it is drawn away from increasingly important uses. Fully aware of this difficulty, Marshall tried to circumvent it by arguing that the marginal utility of money is constant if the elements that "generally belong to the second order of small quantities" are neglected. Unfortunately, apart from another assertion that this neglect is justified by the fact that the "expenditure on any one thing . . . is only a small part" of the budget, Marshall never explained his
p}x + m' =
The first equation shows that, save for the scale, the demand curve for C, is identical to the curve representing the marginal utility of the same commodity. Consequently, the areas under the demand curve measure both money and utility. But neither Pareto nor other mathematical economists seem to have realized that the above model vindicates Marshall only if m' > m*, i.e., only if 0 < p^x < mn — m*. Also, Marshall's supposition that ptx/m0 is small would not do if m(] < m*. Pareto then set out (1906) to determine under what conditions W'(ra) is constant, not with respect to m, but with respect to some price, pl. The shift only attests to the confusion Marshall created by not specifying whether he understood the marginal utility of money to be constant with respect to ra or to p. Pareto reached two conclusions. The first is that W'(ra) is constant with respect to p, if U( has unit elasticity, a case which corresponds to the first singularity discussed earlier: U[ = a/x, and the expenditure for C x , p^x = a/W( (m'}, does not vary with p,. Perhaps the average Englishman used to set aside a fixed sum to buy tea at any price, but to assume the same behavior for every other commodity is, realistically, absurd. Besides, nothing suggests that Marshall had in mind a demand of unit elasticity. Pareto's second result is that W'(m) is constant with respect to any price if the absolute value of the analytical expression (6)
T=
p'i U"
+
Pl U''
U
is infinite. Obviously, T is infinite if some £/• = constant, and hence, U" = 0, a case discussed earlier. Pareto goes on to say, "T can be large, even very large, if the number of commodities is great," but he dismisses the thought as totally uninteresting.
248
UTILITY
More recently, Samuelson (1942) proved that even within the most general utility structure Marshall is right only for absurd cases. However, Samuelson's proof, too, is based on a strict interpretation of "constancy" and on the assumption that all commodities are included in every budget. It seems, therefore, that in none of these mathematical works did the quasi constancy of the marginal utility of money get a fair hearing. Surprisingly enough, it is far more difficult to probe the correctness of the quasi-constancy assumption than that of the strict-constancy assumption. The problem has been tackled only in part and only in comparatively recent times (Friedman 1935; Georgescu-Roegen 1936a). An example of the sort of difficulties encountered in the case of quasi constancy is the assertion that T tends toward infinity if the number of commodities increases without limit. Since T is a sum of terms having no connection with each other, there is no basis on which to predict its limit in the general case. Besides, note that T is a dimensional variable with dimension given by (money) 2 /(utility). Therefore, a change in the units of the PI from dollars to cents increases the numerical value of T by 10,000. Thus, there is no scale for ascertaining whether T is sufficiently large to warrant the quasi constancy of W'(w). Actually, 1/T represents the slope of the tangent to W'(rn). And it was Marshall himself who taught us to use elasticity, never slope. Moreover, examples have been constructed to prove that even the elasticity of W(m) does not necessarily tend toward zero when n increases. One can nonetheless approach the problem differently. A substantial part of the budget of any middle-class consumer is in fact spent on mere conveniences, such as magazines, greeting cards, flowers, movie tickets, and the like. These constitute marginal expenditures, in the sense that a small variation in the budget would cause one of them either to disappear completely from the budget or to become a new budget item. And since such conveniences usually are numerous, the marginal utility of money remains quasi constant for the income range in point—as can be shown with the aid of a diagram analogous to Figure 4. For this income range, Marshall's reasoning can be applied, with the appropriate approximation, to any commodity for which the expenditure is not a large fraction of the budget. Utility and disutility In the picture that Plato and every utilitarian after him drew of man's motives and actions, opposite the utility procured by commodities there stands the disutility caused by labor. However, the
law governing disutility is not a mirror image of the principle of marginal utility. The general description of the sensations caused by toiling was formulated in 1855 by Jennings: following a brief period of discommodity at the outset, a laborer experiences for a while some pleasure, but soon irksomeness sets in progressively, and "the amount of toilsome sensation attending each succeeding increment [of time is] greater than that of the increment preceding." The last part of this description constitutes the "principle of increasing marginal disutility." The entire law is represented by the curve of marginal disutility, ABCK in Figure la. Naturally, if £„ — OT represents the maximum length of time the individual can work daily, the marginal disutility, D'(t), is infinite for £„. This seems simple enough. Yet disutility raises
L', N', or P'
UTILITY some fundamental issues with greater force than does utility. One such issue pertains to the timefactor. What has happened to the pleasure experienced during the interval BC by the time the worker feels exhausted? In other words, can utilities or disutilities be added over time? Some sport enthusiasts incur the discommodity of rowing a boat all Sunday long for "sheer pleasure." The point, as Plato argued, is that nothing is either pure pleasure or pure pain; everything is a "juxtaposition" of both. Even the activity ordinarily called labor is not pure discommodity; otherwise we would not hear so many people say, "I truly enjoy my work." Consequently, whether or not the disutility of labor can be treated as a simple quantum depends upon whether we accept the Benthamite thesis that pleasure and pain cancel each other or we believe, with Plato, that even though "both admit of more and less," pain is not the negation of pleasure. Modern economic theory goes along with Bentham, taking as its first article the idea that pleasure is the positive, and pain the negative, face of the same essence. Even the elemental fact that the discommodity of labor is not simply the absence of leisure is generally ignored; leisure is equated with freedom from the burden of work; and the satisfaction it yields is reduced to the enjoyment of not working. As a result, in the current analyses of the supply of labor, the commodity of leisure never appears side by side with the discommodity of labor. We find either the model originated by Gossen and Jevons, involving only the disutility of labor, or that of Walras, involving only the utility of leisure. Let r,, r 2 , • • • represent the number of work hours necessary to produce one unit of C a , C2, respectively. The "marginal utility of labor-time through Ci," has exactly the same general properties as V'^m}. By the same artifice of horizontal addition, we can construct the curve P,P2 • • • Q in Figure la, representing the marginal utility of labor-time, P'(0The difference N'(t) = P ' ( t ) - D ' ( t ) is the net marginal utility of labor-time; it is positive for t < OT, and negative for t > OTg. Therefore, Tg is the saturation point of the net utility of labor-time. If one ignores the utility of leisure, as Gossen does, the optimal labor-time is OT,,. In the optimal distribution, t, = aal, t., = a T a 2 , f;! = a_,a 3 , £4 = azEn are the number of hours spent on producing C 1? C 2 , C 3 , C4, respectively. This is another general theorem first formulated by Gossen: "in order to maximize his life pleasure, man should distribute his time and labor power among the satisfaction of
249
various enjoyments in such a way that for every enjoyment the value of the atom produced last should be equal to the labor hardship that he would have experienced if he had to produce that atom at the last moment of his labor exertion." The above solution can be immediately adapted to the case of a wage earner simply by choosing the money unit so that the wage rate is unity and replacing the labor coefficients, r , , by the market prices, p,. The scale of the abscissa then measures both money and labor-time, and P,Q represents the marginal utility of earned money, W(t). The Gossenian supply of labor-time is tg = OTg. The Walrasian approach ignores labor disutility: the individual merely maximizes the satisfaction derived from two "commodities," earned money and leisure. In Figure Ib, P,Q represents the marginal utility of earned money and LM the marginal utility of leisure I/(t), the latter being drawn with the abscissa reversed. Let Ew be the intersection of PiQ and LM. The Walrasian supply of labor is tic — U 1 ic •
Let R'Q' represent the net marginal utility of labor-time N ' ( £ ) > and let Ec be the intersection of JR'Q' and LM. Clearly, the time distribution that maximizes the individual's total utility—i.e., the net utility of labor-time and the utility of leisure— corresponds to Tc. This correct solution, according to which the supply of labor is tc = OTC, was given by S. N. Patten in 1892 but now seems to have been forgotten. Interestingly, Patten argued that tc < tg characterizes an advanced economy. Utility and the time-factor The time-factor, an issue to which the early writers paid considerable attention, has gradually become a rather neglected topic in utility theory. For Gossen, the economic problem consisted precisely of how man should distribute his time so as to obtain the greatest pleasure out of life. His two fundamental laws refer only to time: (1) As the same enjoyment continues in time, the magnitude [intensity] of pleasure continuously decreases until ultimately satiety is reached. (2) A similar diminution of pleasure occurs if we repeat a previously satisfied pleasure: both the initial magnitude [intensity] and the maximum duration of the enjoyment decrease with each repetition and, moreover, the sooner the repetition the greater is the decrease. The second law brings up one important aspect of the time-factor: in essence it says that enjoyments at different periods of time are not independent. But as stated, it negates the familiar fact that many pleasures are not worn out by their daily repetition. Through some questionable logic, Gos-
250
UTILITY
sen sought to prove that for each particular pleasure there is an optimum rhythm of repetition. This is tantamount to saying that every pleasure— whether that of eating bread or listening to a symphony concert—is rejuvenated after the lapse of some definite time interval. By this amendment— rediscovered later by others and now known as the "law of the periodic recurrence of wants"—Gossen implicitly abandoned his initial formulation of the second law. Also, like many after him, he considered only the case in which pleasures are not affected by age and, moreover, assumed that everyone knows his own life span and plans his life from its first moment. Obviously, then, everyone should distribute each commodity equally among the successive and periodic enjoyments covered by his life span. Needless to say, this oversimplified scheme completely evicts the time-factor from economic behavior. One aspect of the time-factor, however, burst through this static scheme from the outset. In an argument so clumsy that it could not possibly fare well, Jevons contended that x in U'(x~) must always represent a flow rate, "so much commodity producing a certain amount of pleasurable effect per unit of time." Now, if x is to represent a rate per unit of time, this rate can only be the rate at which, say, milk is available to the consumer daily, not the rate at which he drinks milk from a glass. Many contemporary writers, however, are satisfied with the ambiguous formula "x is the amount of tea." Others specify that x represents a uniform flow rate; still others insist that for a realistic representation, x must be a quantity (Fisher 1892). True, apart from a few exceptional cases, the consumer chooses between quantities of commodities, not between flow rates for the duration of his life. To be more realistic, one must add that the utility of any quantity depends also upon how long the consumer expects this quantity to last him—as Menger insisted. The time-factor thus brings into the picture the time horizon. And it is notorious that the time horizon has an extremely blurred limit, a consequence of the pure uncertainty that envelops the future. There are still other important problems raised by the time-factor. There is, first, the hysteresis effect resulting from the individual's continuous adaptation, to which Marshall ([1890] 1948, p. 807) called our attention. (See also Georgescu-Roegen 1950 and the works of J. Duesenberry and F. Modigliani quoted there.) Actually, the hysteresis effect is a main pillar of the modern concept of utility. Another complication created by the time-factor was first pointed out by Jevons. On a hint from
Bentham, Jevons observed that the more remote from the present a pleasure is, the dimmer its importance appears to the individual. The resulting time preference, or impatience, later became "the nub and kernel" of Bohm-Bawerk's theory of interest (1884-1912). Curiously, according to Jevons' law, if an individual were given his life income in one lump sum, he would not distribute it over time in such a way as to obtain the maximum actual pleasure out of it. Further interesting inconsistencies resulting from the "myopia" produced by a discount factor of future utility have been pointed out by Strotz (1956). It must be admitted, however, that we have no satisfactory answer for many problems raised by the time-factor. The reason is that any simile embracing all its aspects, or even some of them, exceeds the present limits of analytical manageability. The mathematical analysis of the utility of infinite sequences of income over time—initiated by Koopmans (1960)—affords a glimpse of the difficulty. There is little doubt that by far the greatest amount of work still to be done in utility theory concerns the time-factor. The marginal principle of Carl Menger Although Menger is listed along with Jevons and Walras as a founder of utility theory, his approach is fundamentally different. His theory is rather akin to the ordinalist doctrine of later days and also to Edgeworth's general scheme of interdependent utilities. Instead of axioms B, C, and D, Menger uses a far more transparent basis, which, recast in axiomatic form, is as follows: Axiom E: The individual has various general needs, each consisting of a sequence of concrete needs that can be satisfied only in succession. Axiom F: All concrete needs of an individual are ordered on a scale of importance (Bedeutung*), with the successive concrete needs of the same general need in decreasing order of importance. Axiom G •. The concrete needs are such that each is satisfied over a period of time by one definite dose (Teilquantitdt} of one or several commodities. Table 2 — Monger's lexicographic ordering of concrete needs GENERAL NEED
CONCRETE NEED
;
//
First Second Third Fourth Fifth Sixth
10 9 6 5 3 1
8 4 2 1
III 7 1
IV 5
3 2 1
V 4 3 2 1
UTILITY Menger's position is illustrated by Table 2. The Roman numerals denote the general needs, in the order of their relative importance. The Arabic numerals show the relative importance of the successive concrete needs of each general need. The idea is that even though the second concrete need of ii has the same importance rating as the first concrete need of v, the former is more urgent than the latter. In other words, Menger's table is a lexicographic ordering of concrete needs. We can then assign a unique rank to each concrete need and obtain a "need scale." (This formulation is carefully explained in Bohm-Bawerk [1884-1912] 1959, vol. 2, pp. 140 ff.) Menger, however, is far from being explicit on the nature of the need scale. He begins by explaining that the Arabic numerals of the table "are not intended to express numerically the absolute but merely the relative magnitudes of importance of the satisfactions in question." But he immediately adds that if the importance of two satisfactions are represented by 40 and 20, then "the first of the two satisfactions has twice the importance of the second," which makes sense only if importance is a cardinal variable. Nevertheless, the general tone of his Principles leaves little doubt that Menger actually had in mind an ordinal, not a cardinal, scale. To observe that any set of concrete needs can be ordered according to their importance and to proclaim that the value of a commodity is determined by the least important need the commodity satisfies does not suffice for a theory of value. Menger added the proposition that because the individual economizes, an additional dose lowers the value of a commodity to that of the next most important need. This constitutes Menger's "principle of decreasing marginal importance." Menger thought that with its aid the problem of passing from the scale of needs to the scale of value had been solved. The only case considered by Menger— that of a single commodity satisfying all needs —raises no difficulty. The situation is entirely different for the case of several commodities, and this case became the problem child of the Austrian school, involving all Menger's followers in endless controversies. As Menger was first to note, the same need may be satisfied alternatively by several commodities. Consequently, which need is satisfied by a particular dose of a commodity depends upon the available doses of all commodities. The need fulfilled by an additional dose of a commodity may very well have the same importance rating as the need fulfilled by the preceding dose in the initial allo-
257
cation. Bohm-Bawerk tried to solve the impasse by distinguishing between the direct and the indirect importance of a marginal dose—the basis for the current opinion that the Austrian school explained values as opportunities forgone indirectly. However, even with Bohm-Bawerk's amendment, Menger's theory cannot explain prices. If Menger's illustration leaves a different impression, it is because of a series of numerical coincidences. Mending this gap in the theory without adulterating its characteristic rationale would require that Menger's scale be extended to include ratings of all sets of concrete needs. Menger's followers, however, moved in an entirely different, easier direction. Both Wieser and Bohm-Bawerk, by a verbal legerdemain, equated Grenznutzen with Jevons' marginal utility, and Menger's ordinal importance rating with Jevons' cardinal utility. Actually, Bohm-Bawerk used more words than any other economist in arguing that satisfaction has a cardinal measure. Thus, Menger's followers abandoned the most salient idea of his theory: they all continued to use his jargon, but they reasoned like Jevons or, rather, like Edgeworth, without admitting it overtly. The general utility function; interdependent utilities A new vista was opened by Edgeworth, who disposed of the unrealistic assumption of independent utilities (Axiom C above). His idea, which in retrospect seems ultrasimple, is to conceive of total utility as a general function, U = U(X-L, x2, • • • , xn), of the amounts of all commodities, instead of the sum of separate utilities, as in (1). Figure 8,
Figure 8
252
UTILITY
devised by Edgeworth to represent the new utility function, is one of the most popular in the economic literature. The cardinal measures, x and y, of the commodities C, and C2 are represented on the axes Ox and Oy. A curve such as (w,,) represents all combinations of x and y that have the same utility, U(x, y } = w,,, for the given individual. Edgeworth called such a curve an "indifference curve," to express the fact that since the combinations A and A' have the same utility, the individual must be indifferent as to whether he has one or the other. For reasons to become apparent later, the term "utility curve"—used by Johnson (1913)— seems more appropriate. In the case of more than two commodities, the term "utility varieties" will be used. In a three-dimensional space the utility function U = U ( x , y ' ) can be represented as a surface, which Pareto wittily referred to as "the hill of pleasure." The utility curves corresponding to various amounts of utility constitute the two-dimensional map of this hill. The point S corresponds to the hill's top, i.e., to the absolute saturation combination, for which U(x,y~) is maximum. A point such as S' is one of relative saturation: at S', U(x,y~) is maximum if x alone is allowed to vary. The area ONSM covers the normal situations. For any combination inside this area the marginal utilities of both C\ and C 2 are positive: Ux = dU/dx > 0, Uu = dU/dy > 0. Edgeworth retained the principle of decreasing marginal utility. By and large, there seems to be no immediate reason against continuing to assume that the utility increment of a second pound of beef is smaller than that of the first pound, regardless of how much potatoes the individual has. The principle is expressed now by the negative sign of the second partial derivatives: U.rjc = d-U/dx- < 0, Um = 82U/dy2 < 0. On a grid of utility curves separated by the same utility increment Aw (Figure 8), the same property is expressed by AB < BD, AC < CE. Edgeworth and everyone after him drew the utility curves convex toward the origin. It should be emphasized, however, that this property is not a necessary consequence of the principle of decreasing marginal utility. Conversely, the convexity of the utility curves does not imply the principle of decreasing marginal utility. At first Edgeworth justified this convexity on the additional assumption that the marginal utility Ux increases with y, i.e., (8)
Uxv
17 ~ -
0 U '
But later on he contended that the contrary assumption, (9)
a,,<0,
which means that the marginal utility of C, decreases with the amount of C,, is more in the spirit of the principle of decreasing marginal utility. In the end, he admitted that both situations may occur: he called the goods satisfying (8) complementary, those satisfying (9) rival or competitive. The intermediate case, where U.ell = 0, corresponds to independent utilities. An equivalent but more transparent definition is due to Pareto: two commodities are complementary, independent, or competitive according to whether they yield together a greater, equal, or smaller utility than they yield separately. If the two commodities are complementary or independent, the utility curves must be convex. The same applies to mildly competitive commodities. But cases of strongly competitive commodities can be conceived which, although satisfying the principle of decreasing marginal utility, yield utility curves concave toward the origin (Georgescu-Roegen 1966, pp. 60 ff.). The optimal budget. The optimal budget, B, is represented in Figure 9 by that point of the budget line AM which lies on the highest possible utility curve. If B contains both commodities, it is the point of tangency of this utility curve and AM. Now, if Ax is sufficiently small and if we substitute A?/ for Ax so as to keep the individual on the same utility curve, we have [/,. Ax + Uyky = 0. Hence, the "marginal rate of substitution," which corresponds to the slope of the tangent to the utility curve, is dy/dx — -(UjYl/y). On the other hand, the slope of the budget line p.rx + p,,y = m is — (p.r/P,/). From the equation of the budget line and the equality of the two slopes, we obtain a system of equations that determines the optimal budget—a system formally identical to (4). For the analysis of the changes in the optimal budget caused by changes in m or in the prices, it is again convenient to group all commodities whose prices remain constant into a single coordinate. Let the prices of Ci+l, C i+2 , • • • , C n , 1 < i < n, be kept constant, and let TO be the amount of money that the individual can spend (optimally) on these commodities. It can easily be shown that his utility is now represented by 1l(xl,x2, • • • , x i , m ~ ) and that this utility function yields convex utility varieties. Let us now assume that the utility curves of Figure 9 are those of II(x, m). LetTO= OM be the money at the disposal of the individual, and let MA be the budget line corresponding to some price, p, of the commodity C, measured on Ox. The individual's demand for C is Oa, and Ob is his reserve demand for money to be spent on other commodities. An increase in m, i.e., a parallel shift of MA to MiAi, normally increases the demand for C.
UTILITY But, as shown in Figure 9, this demand may decrease. In this case, C is said to be an "inferior" commodity. If ra remains constant and p decreases, the new budget line is MA'. Again, the demand for C normally increases, but in some exceptional cases it may decrease. These cases, first brought to light by R. Giffen, were considered paradoxical because they contradicted the Cournot-Marshall law of demand. Clearly, they can occur only if C is an inferior commodity, but this is not a sufficient condition. m
commodity, i.e., if (Ax) m < 0, then (Ax) p may be positive, negative, or zero, depending on the relative magnitudes of (Ax) m and (Ax) s . Demand, therefore, may increase with price if the commodity is a strongly inferior good—as bread is for the poor. Of course, if one neglects the incomeeffect—as Marshall implicitly did in his analysis of demand—then (Ax) p = (Ax) s is always positive. To determine the effect of a decrease in p on the demand of a commodity C', other than C, all we need do is visualize the same argument applied to a three-dimensional map representing the utility varieties of TJ(x, y,m). We thus obtain a relation analogous to (10):
(11) M
O
A
A,
Figure 9
Two general relations between the changes in demand of the sort just considered were first established by Slutsky (1915). In a different form, they were rediscovered by Hicks and Allen (1934), who also completed the interpretation supplied by Slutsky. Moreover, Hicks (1939) offered a very simple graphical proof of Slutsky's first relation. In Figure 9, the change in the demand for C when money increases is the "income-effect," (Ax) TO = aa'; the change in the demand for C when p decreases is the "price-effect," (hx\ = aa". The price-effect can be decomposed into two movements: from B to B' and from B' to B". The second movement, which takes place on the same utility curve, is a substitution of C for money. Hence, the corresponding change in x is called the "substitutioneffect," (Aoc)g = a'a". The elementary form of the first Slutsky relation is immediately apparent from the graph: (10)
( A x ) p = (Ax) m + (Ax) s .
Noting that because of the convexity of the utility curves (A#) g is always positive if p decreases, from (10) we obtain the general law of demand for a decrease in p: If C is a normal commodity, i.e., if (Ajc) TO > 0, then (Aac) p > 0. If C is an inferior
253
;= (Ay); + (Ay);,
which is the elementary form of the second Slutsky relation. However, in contrast with (Ax) s , the crosssubstitution-effect (ky)'g may have any sign. Using a contour map of the utility variety li(x, y, TO) = constant for money levels m, one can show, however, that the two cross-substitution-effects, (Aac)£ and (Ay)£, have the same sign. On this property Hicks and Allen based a new definition: C and C' are complementary or competitive according to whether this sign is positive or negative. It can be shown that the Hicks-Allen definition is formally identical to the Edgeworth-Pareto definition. Both definitions say in essence that two goods are complementary or competitive according to whether the individual values two increments taken together more or less than he values them taken separately. The only difference is that in the Edgeworth-Pareto definition "values" refers to utility, whereas in the Hicks-Allen definition it refers to the amount of money that the individual is just willing to pay for an additional increment (Georgescu-Roegen 1952). It should be emphasized, however, that the two definitions are not equivalent. They are so only if money measures utility, i.e., only if the marginal utility of money is constant. Ordinal utility and binary choice The small volume published in 1886 by an Italian engineer, Antonelli, in which he presented a theory of consumer behavior without resorting to any measure of utility, must be considered one of the most important milestones in utility theory. Fate willed that Antonelli's work should remain largely ignored in spite of the high praise it received from a few writers, and until recently, the glory of being the first to hint at the nonnecessity of cardinal utility has belonged to Fisher (1892). Fisher's hint and Antonelli's work inspired Pareto to develop two distinct theories, each capable of
254
UTILITY
replacing Edgeworth's. One of these is now known as the theory of choice. Pareto argued that it is unnecessary, as well as unwarranted, to assume that the individual is capable of attributing a definite utility quantum to commodity combinations. All we need to (and can) say is that if the individual is asked to choose between two bundles of commodities, M, and M,, he always either chooses the same bundle or is indifferent as to which one he gets. This "postulate of binary choice" obviously does not imply the cardinality of utility. But Pareto, as was often the case with him, summarily concluded that if we have enough answers from the individual, we can represent his preferences by a map of indifference curves (varieties) having the same basic properties as the utility curves of Edgeworth: the individual is indifferent as to whether he has M, or M.., if and only if M, and M-> are on the same indifference variety; he prefers M, to M.., if and only if M! is on a higher indifference variety than M 2 . Granting, however, the existence of the indifference varieties, one can rank them in the order of the individual's preference. Pareto proposed referring to any ranking of this sort as an "ophelimity index." Once such an index,
is to a large extent arbitrary. If ). For example, if 0 = \/ xy, then F = <jr + 2 = xy + 2 is another ophelimity index: in both cases all the points on the curve xy = c have the same index, which is lower than that of the higher indifference curve xy = c' > c. As we now say, cardinal utility is replaced by ordinal utility, i.e., by ophelimity. Or, to put it differently, utility can be ordered, but it cannot be measured in the same sense in which length or mass can. The nature of an ordinal variable is illustrated by the Mohs scale for hardness. On that scale diamond and talc have the indexes 10 and 1, respectively; however, this does not mean that diamond is ten times harder than talc in any conceivable sense. Obviously, the Mohs scale can be replaced, if we so wish, by any other arbitrary but increasing sequence of ten numbers. Let us write MT(5M2 to indicate that M, is chosen from the pair (M l ; M 2 ). If M,,^MT also applies, we have the indifference case, for which we can write either M^SMZ or M2^M,. If only M,@M2 applies, then MT is preferred to M2 and we write
Assuming now that for three different combinations we had A,£PAo, A^As, A^A,, we could not possibly represent them by an ophelimity index, for no numbers can satisfy the inequalities <£(A,) > < K A 3 ) , < K A 3 ) > < £ ( A , ) . Pareto's theory, therefore, should also include the postulate that preference is always transitive, i.e., if AifPA., and Ao/?A 3 , then A,/?A.,. The usual justification for the transitivity postulate is that it represents the "rationality" of the individual's choice. But even the transitivity condition is not sufficient for establishing an ophelimity index. One needs in addition the "indifference postulate," which asserts the existence of indifferent combinations or, what comes to the same thing, perfect substitutability in choice. For a most intuitive introduction of this new idea, we may refer first to another elementary (and necessary) proposition: if MJ •£ Mo are regular combinations (see Figure 1 and the discussion adjoining it) and if no commodity is contained in MI in a smaller amount than in M L >, then M 1 /?M 2 . A simple form of the indifference postulate states that given a combination M such that M&M2 and Mld)M, there exists on the segment M,M2 a combination N indifferent to M (Georgescu-Roegen 1936b, pp. 136 ff.). For a long time this postulate has been (and it often still is) treated as a logical necessity, on the grounds that one cannot pass from nonpreference to preference without passing through indifference. But by the same token, there should be an intermediary state between preference and indifference, and so on. The indifference postulate, therefore, is not a tautology: it is conceivable that it may not fit the facts. The three postulates mentioned above suffice to prove the following: (1) the loci of combinations indifferent to a given M is a curve (surface) passing through M, (2) all combinations on such a curve are indifferent to each other (transitivity of indifference), (3) the indifference curves do not intersect. It is customary to make the additional assumption that in the normal region the indifference curves are convex toward the origin, an assumption which Hicks and Allen (1934) translated as the "principle of decreasing marginal rate of substitution." However, as Hicks (1939) observed, no transparent property of choice seems to support it (but see Georgescu-Roegen 1966, pp. 60 if., 188 ff.). Thus completed, the theory of binary choice provides us with a map of indifference curves structurally identical with that of utility curves (Figure 8). Moreover, all propositions concerning the consumer's demand (or supply) remain true be-
UTILITY
255
cause even in the case of measurable utility the various effects are movements in the commodity space, not on the utility hill. This is true, in particular, of relations (10) and (11). Naturally, we can no longer speak of utility, including the utility of money, but the only important analytical loss is that we can no longer have a grid of equally distant indifference curves and, hence, the Edgeworth— Pareto definition of related goods becomes useless. The merit of the Hicks-Allen definition is that it works for ordinal utility as well. It seems hard to accept that in his choices the individual is like a perfectly accurate instrument. Choice must be affected by a psychological threshold. Confronted, at various but small intervals of time, with M\ and M-,, the individual will on some occasions prefer M n , on others M 2 . The structure of the individual's choice is then described by a binary function, o^M,, M,), representing the probability that he will choose M x . Clearly, w ( M t , M 2 ) + o)(M-2, Mj) = 1. But it should be emphasized that since no individual cares which of two identical combinations he gets, o>(M, M) is completely inFigure 70 determinate. Indifference and preference can now be defined with relation to the value of OJ(M!, M 2 ). From market data we can find out the optimal For example, indifference may be defined as either allocation, M, of each budget AB (Figure 10). If o)(M l 5 M 2 ) = | or o)(M l 5 M 2 ) ^ 0,1. Various postuthe budget does not cover a point of absolute saturalates have been suggested for this structure (e.g., tion, it is clear that any direction MN below the Georgescu-Roegen 1966, pp. 228-240), but the budget line is a nonpreference direction and, if structure is apt to become very complicated as we "kinky" structures are barred, that any direction pass to multiple choice. For example, M3 may be MN' above the budget line is a preference direction. the most frequently chosen among ( M i , M 2 , M 3 ) , even though M! and M2 are more frequently chosen There remain the limiting directions MA and MB. than Ms in the binary choices (M 1} M 3 ), (M 2 , M 3 ). If the extreme case of perfect substitutability is left out, they, too, must be nonpreference directions— Directional choice a clear-cut case in which no indifference state exists between nonpreference and preference. The second method suggested by Pareto for constructing an ophelimity index from behavioral data To allow for a saturation point, we should also is unmistakably inspired by Antonelli's idea. The consider the case of a point such as M'. But if the data are the prices and the quantities demanded, individual's budget allows him to buy M', he will as observed in the market. Pareto's argument again choose the saturation point S and throw away part rides on extraneous positions, yet his idea contains of his money. Therefore, in order to obtain the the seeds of two entirely new approaches to consame information for M' as for M, we have to oblige sumer behavior—the theory of directional choice the individual to spend all his money on com(Georgescu-Roegen 1936&; 1954a) and the theory modities. of revealed preference (see below). In the theory of The ground is thus prepared for introducing the binary or multiple choice, man's choice is analaxioms of directional choice: ogous to that of a bird which, after surveying from (1) To any regular point, i.e., a point that is above a large piece of ground, dives directly at the not a point of saturation, there corresponds a linear most preferred spot. In the theory of directional (in general, a planar) element such that any direcchoice, man's choice is rather like that of a worm tion in one of the closed half-planes determined by which, from any position, chooses some direction it is one of nonpreference, all others being preferand then moves along it. There are reasons to ence directions. believe that the latter approach may be the more (2) All directions away from a saturation point realistic. are nonpreference directions.
256
UTILITY
(3) If MB is a limiting direction for M and if K is any point on the half-line MB, the same direction is a nonpreference direction for K. Let £Li(X; — Xi) = 0' be the equation of the planar element corresponding to M(X, x2, • • • , # „ ) , where the L; are chosen so that the direction MM', M' = M + AM, is a preference, limiting, or nonpreference direction, depending on whether
(12) Assuming that the L ; are differentiable, from Axiom 3 we obtain
(13)
= 0 =>
; < 0.
This is known as the convexity condition of the planar elements. It further yields (14)
E ^ A x ; < 0 = > E ^ A ^ - t - E A L i A x , <0,
which means that if MN is a nonpreference direction for M, the same direction is a nonpreference direction for any point N on the half-line MN. This is the "principle of persisting nonpreference." From it and Axiom 2 (in the strong form stated above), it follows that, S being a saturation point, MS is a preference direction for any M. The corollary is that at a finite distance there can be only one saturation point. For the case of two commodities, by a mathematical operation called the integration of the linear elements we can construct a family of "integral curves," such that the tangent to any curve at any of its points is the linear element of that point. Through each ordinary point passes at least one integral curve. From (13) it follows that the integral curves are everywhere convex; but as to shape, they may be nonintersecting, closed curves around S, as in Figure 8, spirals converging asymptotically toward S, half-curves originating in S, as in Figure 10, or curves that meet in the pattern of Figure 13 (see below). For a bridge between directional and binary choice, we may adopt the following reasonable convention: if the individual can move from A2 to Al on a path going always in a preference direction, we shall say that A, is directionally preferred to A,, and write A,£P»A2. In the case of Figure 8, if A, is on a "higher" integral curve than A 2 , then A^,}A-2, and conversely. We can then attribute to every integral curve a ranking number increasing toward S. But this ranking, i//(M), is only a pseudo index of ophelimity, because the preceding axioms and convention imply nothing about the ranking of two combinations on the same integral line, i.e., about
the case where ^(Mj.) = ^(M 2 ). Integral curves are not necessarily indifference curves. The point is that the indifference postulate does not fit into the present scheme; all that demand data can reveal is preference. Turning to Figure 10, we see that Mi^Mg and also M^DM\- This contradiction proves that our convention may provide no basis even for ordering all combinations into a "preference" chain; we cannot, then, speak of a pseudo index of ophelimity, because there is no way to decide which of two integral curves is "higher" than another. The whole truth is that we cannot even say that two combinations are comparable. In the Italian edition of the Manuel (1906), Pareto asserted that one can always determine the indifference varieties by integrating the planar elements. In his review the Italian mathematician Vito Volterra reminded Pareto that for more than two commodities the planar elements may not be integrable and, hence, the integral varieties do not always exist. The "nonintegrability problem" was thus born. With it, a paradox emerged: why can an ophelimity index be analytically constructed from demand data for two commodities but not for more than two? All this goes back to Volterra's criticism, which overlooked the fact that integrability does not suffice to establish an index of ophelimity. The necessary and sufficient condition is that the integral varieties should be closed and nonintersecting (as in Figure 8) or, in mathematical terms, should constitute a potential. As illustrated by figures 10 and 13, a potential may not exist even in the case of two commodities. And since only in the case of a potential is the directional preference transitive, the integrability issue is "without any meaning outside the transitivity condition" (Georgescu-Roegen 1936b). Pareto subsequently tried to explain the nonintegrability case by arguing that the ophelimity index depends on the order of consumption, i.e., on the path followed from one position to another. By bringing in the order of consumption, he missed an excellent occasion to solve the puzzle: as he himself admitted, ophelimity is a function of quantities possessed, not consumed. For some time thereafter, opinions about the nonintegrability case were strongly divided: some treated it with concern, others regarded it as a "will-o'-the-wisp." More recently, models of demand theory without an ophelimity ordering have formed the subject of numerous studies, some of which—as pointed out by P. K. Newman and R. C. Read (1958)—contain the ordering assumption implicitly. The simple diagram of Figure 10 suffices to show that demand
UTILITY theory does not require even binary comparability. To see the generality of this statement, let us take a budget plane in a space of three commodities. In this plane there is a system of linear elements. Their integration yields a picture identical to that for two commodities: convex integral curves and a saturation point. The only difference is that now this point is one of relative saturation and coincides with the optimal allocation of the budget. And if the planar elements in the three-commodity space are not integrable, the integral curves in the budget plane are, in general, not closed and hence there is no basis for comparability. Revealed preference; multiple choice Searching for a theory of consumer's behavior freed from any "vestigial traces of the utility concept," Samuelson (1938a) developed a new approach, known as "revealed preference." The basic idea is essentially the same as that of Antonelli and Pareto, namely, to use the objective data of demand as a foundation for the ophelimity concept (cf. Samuelson 1947, pp. Ill, 145-154). However, the distinctive merit of Samuelson's approach is that his point of departure consists of a single and highly transparent proposition involving only finite terms. Let M1(x(11), x(£\ • • - , x(nj)) be an optimal allocation of a certain budget, Ep^Xj = Ep^x^ — m x . Let Mo ^ Mt be a combination that does not cost more than ra,, i.e., a combination such that
(15) The fact that the individual chooses M, even though he can also buy M2 reveals that he prefers Mt to M,. We may then write M 1( ^>Mo. The postulate introduced by Samuelson is now known as the "weak axiom of revealed preference": If M, is revealed to be preferred to Mo, then Mo cannot be revealed to be preferred to M,. Using f:A to denote that proposition A is false, we can express this axiom as follows: (16) \
/
Mi^PpMo => f :M.,£P/zMi. J
^' i\i
~
i
«^-^ iv.
i
In algebra this means that if (15) is true, then (17) \ ' /
(2) (2) y-n r ^ < y-M(2) r (i); / Jri "^i / 't^i •A'i
where p(~\ p(22), • • • , p(n2) are the prices for which M2 is the optimal allocation of the budget ^pf)xi — £pi2)^i2) = rn-z • With this postulate alone, Samuelson proved that demand is uniquely determined for any budget data and that demand depends only on the ratios Pi/m. It is immediately clear that the budget plane for
257
which Ma is the optimal allocation is the planar element of Mi and that the relation Mi£PRM2 is a special case of Mi@DMz . Revealed preference, therefore, is a finite formulation of the theory of directional choice. The only difference is that Samuelson's postulate implies that the optimum allocation always exhausts the budget; obviously, this eliminates any point of absolute saturation at a finite distance. Without this special condition, his proof (1948) that in the case of two commodities the integral curves separate the plane into "better off" and "worse off" regions, just as the indifference curves do, would not be valid. From the weak axiom, Samuelson derived the same convexity condition as that established for directional choice. The important point is that heexpressed this geometrical condition in an economically more transparent form. Applying (15) and (17) to Mg\M', M' - M + AM, Samuelson straightforwardly derived
(18)
0
i Ax, < 0
and the simpler corollary (19)
£pi Axj = 0 => £Api Ax;- < 0,
both relations being valid for any finite displacement AM. In case the Pi are differentiate, (19) yields i —0
(20)
j < 0.
The preceding relations, it should be emphasized, are valid whether or not integral varieties exist. But if they exist, (20) states that they are everywhere convex. Conversely—a point to remember— if they are convex, the weak axiom is true. Another interpretation of (20) is that for any infinitesimal displacement on an integral variety, we must have £dp, dx} < 0. Limiting himself to the case in which the indifference varieties exist, Hicks (1939) saw in this inequality the general law of demand. Subsequently, Samuelson proved that this law is valid even for finite displacements on an indifference variety:
(21)
(KM) =
This result should not be confused with (19), which applies to displacements in the budget plane of M. The concept of revealed preference presents a few slippery points, about which Samuelson tried to warn us. The first is that revealed preference, like any theory based on preference alone, can never arrive at a criterion of indifference. As he put it, integral lines, if they exist, can only "by
258
UTILITY
courtesy" be given the title of indifference curves. The second point concerns the negation of revealed preference. In the theory of choice the negation of M1(£?M2 always entails M2(5Mi. But as can be seen on a diagram of budgets, M! and M2 may be such that neither M^£PRM2 nor M-,
(22)
M,<0 fi M 2 => [
However, the implication is not reversible: ^(M^) > <£(M 2 ) does not entail M^^Mo; all it entails is that M2<£?7eMi is not true. Samuelson further observed that MK^MO, M^/jMs yields 0(M 3 )<(/)(M 1 ), which we may generalize by writing
He also came to talk about "pseudo transitivity," i.e., which within the same framework can immediately be extended to
However, Samuelson stops short of saying anything about the status of (23) or (25) in a pure theory of revealed preference. He speaks of M3 as being "revealed to be better" than Mi (1948, pp. 247 ff.), but he is not explicit on whether he has in mind (23) or a new definition of "indirect revealed preference," based on the relation
(26) M
That (25) is not a consequence of (16) can be immediately shown if we recall that for three commodities the optimal allocation is a point of relative saturation in relation to the integral curves in the budget plane and take the case where these curves are those of Figure 10. All that is required by the weak axiom is that the integral curves be convex. And since the budget planes for M x , M 2 , M3 must be tangent to the corresponding integral curves, we see immediately that M^/jMo, M 2 <£? fl M 3 , and yet, MSC^MI . True, one can nonetheless combine, as Uzawa (1960) did, the weak axiom with some other axioms so as to imply (25). The French mathematician Ville (1946), mov-
ing on the same path as Samuelson, was first to formulate (25) as an axiom and to show how it leads to a preference map equivalent to that of the theory of binary choice. In the Anglo-American literature the same feat was achieved, independently, by Houthakker (1950). Obviously, condition (25), now known as the "strong axiom of revealed preference," generalizes the weak axiom. Some points concerning the weak and the strong axioms deserve emphasis. First, since the weak axiom is equivalent only to the convexity condition, it cannot imply the strong axiom. It does not even deny the existence of a point of absolute saturation, unless the exhaustion of the budget is implicitly assumed. Moreover, this denial would be insufficient for the existence of a preference ordering for more than two commodities. Second, the strong axiom entails more than integrability but less than the existence of an ophelimity index. And since it says, in essence, that one cannot start from a point and return to it moving always in a revealed preference direction, it appears that, after all, Pareto was not a fool in trying to relate the problem of integrability to a shift in the path between two combinations. Revealed preference theory is a special case of what we may call a theory of multiple choice: its basic postulate is that confronted with the set B of all combinations that can be bought with a given budget, Spi^i ^ m, the individual chooses consistently. But his choice need not be unique. Consistency means only that the combinations that he may choose form a nonnull subset, C(B), of B. Samuelson's theory is a special theory of multiple choice, because it considers only a special class of sets, those determined by a budget. It is also a pure theory of multiple choice, because it does not include binary choice (at least, as long as commodities are assumed continuous). In 1954 Arrow suggested a general formalization of a theory of multiple choice (see Arrow 1959 and references given there). Let X, Y, • • • denote the sets belonging to a certain family, B. The first axiom is that the combinations the individual may choose from set X form a nonnull subset, C(X). Any X is thus divided into two separate subsets, the choice set, C(X), and the set X - C ( X ) . We can then define revealed preference, M^RM2, to mean that for some X we have M, e C(X), M, e X - C(X). The equivalent form of the weak axiom is that if M^M,, then (27)
M1,M2eY=>f:M26C(Y).
Arrow considered the case in which B consists of all finite sets. In contrast with Samuelson's, this approach is not a pure theory of multiple choice;
UTILITY
259
it includes the binary choice between any MI , M2 . The point bears upon Arrow's proof that the weak axiom suffices for ordering all combinations. Indeed, this may no longer be true if & includes only multiple choices, as is shown by the following analytical example, which satisfies even the strong axiom :
C{M, N, L, K} = C{M,N,L} = C{M, N, K} = C{M,L,K} = C{N, L, K} =
(M, N}, {M, N}, {M, N}, {M}, {N}.
The individual always chooses, but the preferences revealed by his choices do not lead to a comparison between M and N or between L and K. Utility and its measure In spite of the repeated blows suffered by the Bentham-Edgeworth position, economists kept hoping that utility might after all be measurable in some sense other than mere ordering. Some endeavored to derive a utility measure from the objective data of consumption; others searched for reasons other than Edgeworth's for the existence of a cardinal scale. The pioneering works of Frisch (1926; 1932) and Fisher (1927) practically exhaust the first category. Both authors arrived, independently, at the idea of measuring the marginal utility of money with the aid of consumption data of an "auxiliary" commodity, C^. Their first assumption is that marginal utility, not necessarily utility itself, is cardinally measurable; the second, that the marginal utility of C T is a function of the amount of Cl alone; and the third, that the marginal utility of money is of the form
(28)
W'(m, p l f p a , • • • , p») =
W
-
where P is a cost-of-living index. The budget system (4) then yields (29)
w(r) = — £/'(*) = aU'(x), Pi
where p, is the price of the auxiliary commodity, a = P/PT the inverted deflated price, and r = ra/P the "real income." In the space of coordinates r, a, and x, relation (29) represents a surface, which Frisch called the consumption surface. In Figure lla the intersection, AB, of this surface with a plane parallel to xOa. at the distance r() represents the inverted demand for C, corresponding to the real income r ( ) , i.e., it represents the relation between x and the reciprocal of the deflated price of C t , a = P/P! . The intersection, AC, with a plane parallel to xOr at the distance a0 represents the
Figure l i b
income demand for Cl for the corresponding deflated price, p°/P°. These last intersections are, therefore, Engel curves (Schultz 1938). Finally, there are the intersections, such as DE and D'E', of the same surface with horizontal planes at various values of x. Projected onto the aOr plane, they yield the curves of Figure lib. Because of the relation ac/ab = U'(xl)/U'(x.2'), all these curves can be derived from any one of them by uniform expansion of the vertical scale of the figure. In particular, if x is chosen so that U ' ( x ) = 1, the curve is o; = u>(r). With enough observations, one can determine the consumption surface by interpolation and thus obtain w(r) and, from (28), the marginal utility of money. Both Fisher and Frisch used aggregate consumption data on C : , instead of data for the same individual as required by the theoretical scheme. The procedure is based on the fact that the preferences of people living in the same
260
UTILITY
environment and having comparable incomes do not vary much. The whole scheme met with strong criticism (Allen 1933; Bergson 1936) which, curiously, concentrated on relation (29), not on the assumption of measurability. Although it was a most ingenious econometric piece, the Fisher-Frisch contribution had a short-lived vogue and produced no imitators. Frisch endeavored to justify the measurability of marginal utility by an idea with which Pareto first played. Pareto observed that if the individual is able not only to compare two different combinations but to compare, as well, the utility interval between M L and M., with that between M,, and M 3 , and if, also, he can always say for what M3 the two differences are exactly equal—a possibility in which Pareto did not believe—then, among all possible systems of ophelimity indexes, we should retain only those that display the same differential order as that felt by the individual. Pareto's remarks on this point indicate that he had a better understanding of what measurability of utility means than many subsequent writers on the topic. Much of the controversy of the last forty years has fed on the ambiguous use of the term "measurability." A most enlightened discussion was, however, presented by E. H. Phelps Brown and H. Bernardelli as early as 1934. These authors reminded us of the well-known epistemological distinction between extensive magnitudes, which have homogeneous parts, and intensive magnitudes, which have no parts at all. "Difference," therefore, cannot have the same meaning in both cases. Even though words can be ordered in a dictionary, "the difference between two words is not itself a word," the implication being that the difference between two utilities is not a utility. If ophelimity indexes are replaced by ophelimity words—"cow" for M 1? "energy" for M2, "grate" for M 3 —for "differences" we must use another class of indexes, say, French words. Given that the "difference" between M2 and M! is "equal" to that between M3 and M 2 , we may assign to each the index maison. To the interval from M, to M3 there also corresponds a definite word, say, melon. But without some strong additional assumption we cannot conclude that maison plus maison is melon. Most illuminating though this argument is, it may leave the impression that no intensive magnitude can have a measure that is not purely ordinal. The familiar counterexample is the measure of the feeling of temperature, but a more instructive one is provided by the chronological time. Certainly, time is not a cardinal variable. No meaning can be attached to subsuming chronological dates or multiplying them by a number. Like the Paretian ophelimity,
they can only be ordered; yet there is the feeling of the passage of time between two dates. The question is whether a person can say that the amount of time that has passed between breakfast and lunch is more than, less than, or equal to the amount of time between tea and bedtime. It is similar to the question of whether the individual can compare the feeling of passing from Mi to M2 to that of passing from M3 to M4 . The difference is that for time intervals we do have an instrumental measure — that provided by the special mechanisms called clocks. However, there is no basis whatever for believing, as Newton did, that one clock-hour contains in some absolute sense the same amount of "time" as another clock-hour. Consequently, the fact that time intervals have an instrumental measure implies neither that the individual can compare such intervals nor that, if he can do so, he feels that a two-hour interval is twice as long as a one-hour interval. [Scales of measurement are discussed further in PSYCHOMETRICS and STATISTICS, DESCRIPTIVE.] The above points bear upon Pareto's argument, further elaborated by Lange (1934), that the simple comparability of ophelimity intervals suffices to construct an ophelimity scale similar to that of the thermometer. The argument seems to enjoy great popularity in spite of Samuelson's proof of its insufficiency (1938c). Samuelson's argument focuses on the point that without some sort of a metric axiom there can be no question of a stronger measure than the ordinal one. If some appropriate metric axioms are added to the assumption that an ophelimity index exists, we can prove the following: (#) There exists an ophelimity index * such that (30) ft(M) - ft(N) >ft(M')- ft(N') > 0 implies that the utility interval [M', N'j is not greater than [M, N]. ( b ) If $* is another ophelimity index satisfying this same condition, then, a and b being some parameters, we have (31) 0' = aft + &. The scale determined by $*, it should be emphasized, is not a cardinal scale: such a scale requires that <£>* = a<£*. It is, however, analogous to that for temperature and for time: it depends on the unit of measurement and on the origin of the scale. We may refer to it as a "weak cardinal scale," to reflect the fact that a cardinal scale exists for the intervals, for according to (31), (32) AcJ»* = aA#;. One should, however, be on guard against one unwarranted conclusion. The fact that we can com-
UTILITY pute the ratio, r, between *(M) — <£*(N) and ^>*(M') — <j)*(N'~) and then write symbolically [M, N] = r[M', N'] does not prove at all that this paper-and-pencil operation has any meaning for the individual concerned. Should he feel that two successive intervals represented by maison are equivalent to the interval melon, this equivalence ought to be stated as an axiom from the outset. But then, all other axioms would become superfluous. Another idea leading to a measure of utility was the root of the first formulation of the principle of decreasing marginal utility. The earliest discoverers of this principle were confronted with a puzzle known as the St. Petersburg paradox. In gambling, a game is "fair" if the stake is equal to the gain multiplied by the probability of winning, i.e., in general, equal to the mathematical expectation of the gambler, which is Spigf > , where g± , g2 , • • • , gn are the mutually exclusive gains, pi is the probability of g{ , and Spi = 1 . Let us take the simple game in which a fair coin is tossed twice and the rules are as follows: if tails shows on the first toss, the gain is 1 and the game terminates; if tails shows on the second toss but not on the first toss, the gain is 2; if both tosses show heads, the gain is 22. The mathematical expectation is l x Q ) + 2 x (£) + 22 x (A) = 2, a result which seems within reason. But let the game be generalized so that it ends when tails occurs for the first time; if this happens on the nth toss, the gain is 2"'1. In this case the mathematical expectation is
which is infinite. The fact that no gambler would be willing to bet even an enormous sum at this game constitutes the St. Petersburg paradox. Seeking a solution of the paradox, Buffon, Cramer, and Bernoulli were led to observe that the "moral fortune" (the utility of wealth) is not measured by the number of "dollars." For the utility of wealth, Bernoulli proposed his famous formula U(x') — Mog(;x/a), where a is the wealth initially possessed by the gambler and b a characterizing parameter. The "moral expectation," i.e., the mathematical expectation in utility units, of the St. Petersburg game then is 1 + T-J
(34)
A simple mathematical proposition shows that Eu, in contrast to Em, has a finite value (provided that a ^ 0). The value of the game in money terms, w 0 , is given by the equation log [(a + m 0 )/a] = Eu;
261
hence, m0 is finite. This result may be restated as follows : an individual who neither likes nor abhors gambling must be indifferent as to whether he receives m0 dollars or a ticket in a St. Petersburg lottery. Bernoulli's basic idea can be analyzed into two general postulates of increasing strength. Let us denote a risk combination by (35)
(MA
/MlfMt,...,M.\f
\Pi/n
V P i > ? 2 , '-,pn
)
where Mi@Mi+1, £?i = 1, and p4 (> 0) is the probability that the individual should get the sure commodity combination M» . The postulate is that for any risk combination, there is an M such that M,(?M, M@Mn, and (36)
/MA \Pi/»
A stronger form of this postulate, which presupposes the existence of a utility measure for all sure combinations, replaces (36) by the formula of "moral expectation," (37)
Bernoulli used this relation to determine M in a problem where $ was already given. Ramsey (1923-1928) reversed the problem: he used (37) as a basis for constructing a weak cardinal measure for utility, an idea also used, more recently, by von Neumann and Morgenstern (1944). It is obvious that (37) is the metric relation necessary to restrict the arbitrariness of the ophelimity index; for example, (37) cannot be true for both $ and $2. An elementary illustration of the procedure for constructing an ophelimity index satisfying (37) is offered by the case of a single commodity, say, money (Friedman & Savage 1948). Let m' < m", and let us put W(ra') — 0, W(m") = 1. For any ml,m'<m1<m", there is a p, 0 < p < 1, such that (1 - p)W(ra') + pW(ra") = W(m 1 ), and conversely; hence, W(m t ) = p. Similarly, for ra2 > m" there is a q, 0 < q < 1, such that (1 - g)W(ra') + gW(ra 2 ) = W(m"); hence, W(m 2 ) = l/q. Clearly, the ophelimity index thus constructed depends upon the chosen origin, W(ra'), and the chosen unit, W(w") — W(m'). It can be further shown that if <£* satisfies (37), then any other such index $* satisfies * = A(f>*0 + B, and conversely — a result identical to (31). It is thus seen that this second approach is essentially equivalent to that based on the comparability of ophelimity intervals. Actually, Ramsey arrived at a weak cardinal measure of utility by first establishing the comparability of ophelimity intervals. However, the great advantage of the approach based on risk is that its axiomatic foundation is far more obvious and also more con-
262
UTILITY
venient experimentally than that based on the comparability of intervals. Perhaps the best illustration of this advantage is the system of axioms proposed by Marschak (1950). The analogy between the measure of temperature and that of utility does not seem as close as von Neumann and Morgenstern, among others, want us to believe. The thermometer and the clock dispense man from measuring temperature and time intervals by his own scale. For utility there is as yet no hedonimeter and, hence, no measure outside what man can compare and gauge. Even an economist such as Samuelson, to whom modern utility theory owes an immense debt, confesses that he is unable to construct a weak cardinal scale for his own utility. And when we find ourselves incapable of doing what the cardinal theory claims that we can do, certainly something must be wrong with that theory. Various authors came to believe that this paradox of the cardinalist doctrine has its roots in one of the assumptions which are required, in addition to (37), for the complete proof of the existence of a weak cardinal scale and which pertain to the ordering of all commodities. Samuelson, for example, felt that the culprit is the axiom known as the "strong independence axiom" : If p( > p^ , p'k < pk , and pi = Pi for i ^ l,k, then n\
/M^ \P'l>
P' 3 >
n )
(MltMa, • • - , \P,,
?,,
• • ' ,
In view of the high transparency of this axiom, however, Samuelson's conclusion should be suspect. There are good reasons for regarding, instead, the postulate (36) itself as the real culprit: this postulate extends the indifference postulate to all combinations and hence denies that risk adds an essentially different dimension to the object of choice. The fallacy of the ordinalist resides precisely in not seeing that once he has sworn by the principle that between preference and nonpreference one must necessarily pass through indifference, he must accept (36) and therefore can no longer maintain that utility is a purely ordinal variable. In fact, for both theories, the indifference postulate is the only one that is really critical. It is also the only one that can be neither refuted nor confirmed by behavioral experiments, any more than the irrationality of V~2" can be proved on the workbench. And if the indifference postulate is dropped, there is no longer any basis for ordering all commodity combinations by an ophelimity index. Utility and wants The prominent position utility theory occupies in modern economics does not mean that before
utility entered economics there was no theory of consumer behavior. The earlier economists analyzed this behavior in terms of needs or wants, an approach which even Marshall found worthy of attention. Actually, it was the early theorizing about wants that constituted the major source of inspiration for those who laid the foundation of utility theory in economics. The classic parable used by Menger for explaining his marginal principle refers to the needs of an isolated farmer: with a miserable harvest, such a farmer would satisfy only the most commanding need, to keep himself and his family alive; should the harvest exceed this minimum of subsistence, he would allocate the excess to filling his other needs in the order of their decreasing importance—seeds for the next season, fodder for his animals, mash for beverages, food for his pet parrot, and so on down the line. And no subsequent author, it seems, has been able to justify the principle of decreasing marginal utility without invoking the diminishing importance of the needs satisfied by the same commodity. There is no denying that the structure of wants is not amenable to ordinary analysis. Wants are dialectical concepts, with blurred, not sharply drawn, boundaries. But this is no reason for refusing to describe and study them. After all, their structure is not completely amorphous. The first general and the most obvious feature of the structure of wants is their hierarchy. The idea goes back to Plato (Republic n, 369). Even Pareto implicitly recognized the hierarchy of wants by endeavoring to establish a hierarchy of commodities. The hierarchy of wants can be further analyzed into a number of principles of a more intuitive character (Georgescu-Roegen 1954k). The "principle of the subordination of wants," emphasized by T. C. Banfield and reformulated by Jevons, says that "the satisfaction of a lower want . . . permits the higher want to manifest itself." It obviously implies Gossen's law of satiable wants. Moreover, not only does a want have to reach satiety before the next want manifests itself, but also it appears that there is always a next want. The "principle of the growth of wants" states that the number of wants has no end. The terms being interpreted with the flexibility appropriate to the case, we can distinguish three broad classes of wants. The first class consists of necessities, i.e., of those wants that pertain to the immediate requirements of maintaining life—water, food, rest, and shelter, in that order. These wants are common to all men. Above this class there are the conveniences, i.e., the wants which have the same hierarchy for all members of the same culture. Finally, in every society,
UTILITY people who can afford the satisfaction of all wants of the two classes already mentioned manifest wants for luxuries. Purely personal in character, these wants no longer have the same hierarchy for all individuals: one person may prefer a movie camera to a fishing rod; another may prefer a rod to a camera. The luxury wants are also less stable, even for the same individual. Admittedly, this description of the structure of wants ignores many details which may become very important as the analysis is pushed further. The suggestion that wants form a tree structure instead of a linear chain (Strotz 1957) opens up a more realistic vista. One principle, the "principle of the irreducibility of wants," although the most critical of all, has received little attention. It is beyond question that no amount of food can save someone from dying of thirst and that no fancy jewelry can be a substitute for food. Curiously, even Pareto, the author of the indifference theory, mentions this irreducibility. Jevons, too, admits in one place that "motives and feelings are certainly of the same kind to the extent that we are able to weigh them against each other; but they are, nevertheless, almost incomparable in power and authority." In fact, this very thought was expressed by Aristotle (Ethica Nicomachea 1133). The upshot is that it is the principle of irreducibility, not the postulate of indifference, that should be a part of a realistic theory of choice. The consequences can be illustrated by a very simple scheme. Take an imaginary individual whose hierarchy of wants is food, taste, and social companionship and who lives by two commodities only, margarine and butter. Let us also assume that he prefers the taste of butter and that his saturation for food is K calories. Let both margarine and butter be measured in calories, xl, x-,, respectively. For the choice between two combinations for which x^ + x2 < K, i.e., which belong to the triangle OAB in Figure 12, only the most important want, that for food, counts. Any combination above A'B' is preferred to any combination, M, on A'B'. However, the want for food alone cannot decide which of the two combinations M and N—containing the same amount of food—should be chosen. In this case it is the next want in the hierarchy that decides: NM because N contains more butter than M. Now, for the choice between two combinations that satisfy the want for food completely, taste becomes the primary criterion: any combination above Bab is preferred to G or H. However, Hff'G because the individual can entertain more if he chooses H. The same hierarchic choice can be extended to the case in which wants are not related linearly to commod-
O
A'
263
A Figure 12
ities. In Figure 13, all combinations above A'B' are preferred to M, and Nff'M; also all combinations above Bab are preferred to G, and HfPG. The preceding schemes tell several stories. Because they satisfy all axioms of choice except the indifference postulate, they prove that this postulate, upon which the observations of the preceding sections cast substantial doubts, is completely unnecessary for a theory of choice. The curves, such as A'B' or Bab, separate the commodity plane into a preferred and a nonpreferred domain in relation to any combination lying on one of them. Borrowing a term from Little, we may call them "behavior curves." But as is seen from figures 12 and 13, they may meet each other, a most important difference from the traditional indifference curves. Figure 13, which has been drawn so that ba is tangent at a to BA, proves another point: the fact that every combination is an optimal combination for only one
b
264
UTILITY
budget does not entail the nonintersection of behavior (integral) curves. Last but not least, the hierarchy of wants throws overboard not only utility—which it originally bred —but also any ophelimity index. No such index can be constructed for maps like those in figures 12 and 13. To be sure, the hierarchy of wants completely orders all commodity combinations, but the order is a lexicographic ordering that cannot be reduced to a single ranking index. A critique of utility The endeavors to explain economic value by a single "cause" have followed two trails. In the chronological order, it was Marx, in his labor theory of value, who first claimed to have discovered the same thing that Aristotle asserted exists in every exchangeable good. Marx did see that for such a claim it is necessary, first of all, to bring all forms of labor to a common denominator. And he went to great pains to convince us that any concrete labor power is only a particular form of the same "jelly"—general abstract labor. The founders of the utility theory, on the other hand, steamrollered over the parallel issue of whether every concrete want is only a particular form of a general abstract want—utility. For, in essence, this is the meaning of utility. The fact that at one time economists held that utility is measurable, although no one could devise a hedonimeter, led them to defend their position by arguing that a cardinal scale exists only for the utility of an individual person, not for the utilities of all persons. The dogma of the interpersonal noncomparability of utility has ever since been strongly advocated. But if this dogma is accepted, economics must reconcile itself to being a science (perhaps the only one) unable to recognize at least a modicum of standards in the phenomenal domain which it purports to study. Fortunately, the dogma flies in the face of two irresistible forces: the faculty of man called empathy, without which "there is really no game we can play at all, whether in philosophy, literature, science, or family"; and the hierarchy of wants. To be sure, the interpersonal comparison of wants does not always work. At the same time, it can hardly be denied that it makes objective economic sense to help starving people by taxing those who spend their summers at luxurious resorts. There is economic sense even in taxing the latter more heavily than those who cannot afford any luxuries. However, in view of the absence of any order among the luxury wants, there is no objective justification for taxing those who have motorboats and using the money to help
others buy hunting equipment. The fact that the advocates of the interpersonal noncomparability of utility had in front of their eyes only a society of relatively high incomes is certainly responsible for their view. The hierarchy of wants can also reveal and explain some phenomena that disappear under the colorless blanket of utility. The technical problems of a general economic plan are simplest in the case of an economy where the incomes of the overwhelming majority of people are so low that they barely cover the basic human wants. Since these wants are irreducible and rather inflexible, it is a simple problem to estimate the demand for consumer goods in this case. Even for an economy where a large stratum can enjoy many social but not individual wants, the same problem presents little difficulty once these wants and their hierarchy are known with sufficient clarity. It is only when the bulk of incomes can also satisfy some personal wants that the prediction of demand for "luxury" commodities becomes a real thorn for central planning. This is the deep-seated reason why such planning would work poorly in any advanced economy and also why the continuous rise in the average personal income in the Soviet Union has called for increasing decentralization in the production of "luxuries." Finally, another drawback of the utility theory accounts for the despair of most economists who have been called on to make policy recommendations for underdeveloped countries. The general complaint has been that the local people are "irrational," because their choices do not conform to the basic principles of utility theory. But since these people conform to the Fisher-Pareto principle that "each individual acts as he desires," how can they be irrational? The explanation is that utility theory passes, quite furtively, from the above principle to one which is no longer innocuous: each individual desires only commodities. In the theory of choice, therefore, only commodity vectors, X = ( x x , X o , • • • , xn}, count. However, this is not generally true, even for a modern urban society. In making a choice, man generally takes into consideration, in addition to the commodity vector, the action by which he can obtain this vector. In other words, man always chooses between complexes of two coordinates, [X,A], where X is a commodity vector and A the action by which X may be obtained. The former has a utility on the personal "utility scale," the latter a value determined by the cultural matrix of the society in which the individual lives (Georgescu-Roegen 1966, pp. 124-126). A concrete act of choice is, in general, not a culturally
UTILITY free choice. True, in the so-called traditional societies the cultural coordinate often counts more heavily than the utility coordinate; but this constitutes no irrationality at all. One can only say that a theory that would describe adequately the economic behavior of the individuals belonging to a traditional society raises far more complex analytical issues than those of the modern theory of utility. NICHOLAS GEORGESCU-ROEGEN [See also DECISION MAKING, article on ECONOMIC ASPECTS; WELFARE ECONOMICS. Other relevant material may be found in the biographies of BENTHAM; BOHM-BAWERK; EDGEWORTH; GOSSEN; JEVONS; MARSHALL; MARX; MENGER; PARETO; RICARDO; SMITH, ADAM; TURGOT; WALRAS.] BIBLIOGRAPHY ALLEN, R. G. D. 1933 On the Marginal Utility of Money and Its Application. Economica New Series 13:186209. ALLEN, R. G. D. 1935 A Note on the Determinateness of the Utility Function. Review of Economic Studies 2, February: 155-158. ANTONELLI, GIOVANNI B. (1886) 1952 Sulla teoria matematica della economia politica. Milan: Malfasi. -» Reprinted with commentaries by G. Demaria and Giovanni Ricci. ARROW, KENNETH J. 1958 Utilities, Attitudes, Choices: A Review Note. Econometrica 26:1-23. ARROW, KENNETH J. 1959 Rational Choice Functions and Orderings. Economica New Series 26:121—127. BENTHAM, JEREMY The Works of Jeremy Bentham. 11 vols. Edited by John Bowring. New York: Russell, 1962. -» A reprint of the 1838-1843 edition. BERGSON, ABEAM 1936 Real Income, Expenditure Proportionality, and Frisch's New Methods of Measuring Marginal Utility [by Abram Burk]. Review of Economic Studies 4:33-52. BERNOULLI, DANIEL (1738) 1954 Exposition of a New Theory on the Measurement of Risk. Econometrica 22:23-36. -> First published as "Specimen theoriae novae de mensura sortis." Contains notes by Louise Sommer and footnotes by Carl Menger. BOHM-BAWERK, EUGEN VON (1884-1912) 1959 Capital and Interest. 3 vols. South Holland, 111.: Libertarian Press. -» First published as Kapital und Kapitalzins. Volume 1: History and Critique of Interest Theories, 1884. Volume 2: Positive Theory of Capital, 1889. Volume 3, Further Essays on Capital and Interest, was first published as appendixes to Volume 2 of the 19091912 edition and was printed in a separate volume in 1921. BROWN, E, H. PHELPS 1934 Notes on the Determinateness of the Utility Function. Part 1. Review of Economic Studies 2, October:66-69. CANTILLON, RICHARD (1755) 1931 Essai sur le commerce. London: Macmillan. -> Contains an English translation. First published as Essai sur la nature du commerce en general. CHIPMAN, JOHN S. 1960 The Foundations of Utility. Econometrica 28:193-224. CONDILLAC, ETIENNE BONNOT DE (1776) 1948 Le commerce et le gouvernement consideres relativement 1'un
265
a 1'autre. Volume 2, pages 239-267 in Oeuvres philosophiques de Condillac. Edited by Georges Le Roy. Corpus general des philosophes francais. Auteurs modernes, Vol. 33. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. -» The translation of the extract in the text was provided by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen. COURNOT, ANTOINE AUGUSTIN (1838) 1960 Researches Into the Mathematical Principles of the Theory of Wealth. New York: Kelley. -> First published in French. DUPUIT, JULES (1844)1952 On the Measurement of the Utility of Public Works. International Economic Papers 2:83-110. -> First published in French, in Volume 8 of the Annales des ponts et chaussees, Second Series. EDGEWORTH, FRANCIS Y. (1881) 1953 Mathematical Psychics: An Essay on the Application of Mathematics to the Moral Sciences. New York: Kelley. FISHER, IRVING (1892) 1961 Mathematical Investigations in the Theory of Value and Prices. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. FISHER, IRVING 1927 A Statistical Method for Measuring "Marginal Utility" and Testing the Justice of a Progressive Income Tax. Pages 157-193 in Economic Essays: Contributed in Honor of John Bates Clark. Edited by Jacob H. Hollander. New York: Macmillan. FRIEDMAN, MILTON 1935 Professor Pigou's Method for Measuring Elasticities of Demand From Budgetary Data. Quarterly Journal of Economics 50:151-163. FRIEDMAN, MILTON; and SAVAGE, L. J. (1948) 1952 The Utility Analysis of Choices Involving Risk. Pages 5796 in American Economic Association, Readings in Price Theory. Homewood, 111.: Irwin. -» First published in Volume 56 of the Journal of Political Economy. FRISCH, RAGNAR 1926 Sur un probleme d'economie pure. Norsk matematisk forenings skrifter Series 1 no. 16: 1-40. FRISCH, RAGNAR 1932 New Methods of Measuring Marginal Utility. Tubingen (Germany): Mohr. GALIANI, FERDINANDO (1750)1915 Della moneta. Edited by Fausto Nicolini. Bari (Italy): Laterza. -> The translations of the extracts in the text were provided by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen. GEORGESCU-ROEGEN, NICHOLAS 1936a Marginal Utility of Money and Elasticities of Demand. Quarterly Journal of Economics 50:533-539. GEORGESCU-ROEGEN, NICHOLAS (1936b) 1966 The Pure Theory of Consumer's Behavior. Pages 133-170 in Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Analytical Economics: Issues and Problems. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. -> First published in Volume 50 of the Quarterly Journal of Economics. GEORGESCU-ROEGEN, NICHOLAS (1950) 1966 The Theory of Choice and the Constancy of Economic Laws. Pages 171-183 in Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Analytical Economics: Issues and Problems. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. -> First published in Volume 64 of the Quarterly Journal of Economics. GEORGESCU-ROEGEN, NICHOLAS 1952 A Diagrammatic Analysis of Complementarity. Southern Economic Journal 19:1-20. GEORGESCU-ROEGEN, NICHOLAS (1954a) 1966 Choice and Revealed Preference. Pages 216-227 in Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Analytical Economics: Issues and Problems. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. -» First published in Volume 21 of the Southern Economic Journal.
266
UTILITY
GEORGESCU-ROEGEN, NICHOLAS (1954&) 1966 Choice, Expectations, and Measurability. Pages 184-215 in Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Analytical Economics: Issues and Problems. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. -» First published in Volume 68 of the Quarterly Journal of Economics. GEORGESCU-ROEGEN, NICHOLAS 1966 Analytical Economics: Issues and Problems. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. GOSSEN, HERMANN HEINRICH (1854)1927 Entwicklung der Gesetze des menschlichen Verkehrs und der daraus ftiessenden Regeln fur menschliches Handeln. 3d ed. Berlin: Prager. HICKS, J. R. (1939) 1946 Value and Capital: An Inquiry Into Some Fundamental Principles of Economic Theory. 2d ed. Oxford: Clarendon. HICKS, J. R.; and ALLEN, R. G. D. 1934 A Reconsideration of the Theory of Value. 2 parts. Economica New Series 1:52-76, 196-219. HOUTHAKKER, HENDRiK S. 1950 Revealed Preference and the Utility Function. Economica New Series 17: 159-174. HOUTHAKKER, HENDRIK S. 1961 The Present State of Consumption Theory. Econometrica 29:704-740. -» A survey article. JENNINGS, RICHARD 1855 Natural Elements of Political Economy. London: Longmans. JEVONS, W. STANLEY (1871) 1965 The Theory of Political Economy. 5th ed. New York: Kelley. JOHNSON, W. E. 1913 The Pure Theory of Utility Curves. Economic Journal 23:483-513. KOOPMANS, TJALLING 1960 Stationary Ordinal Utility and Impatience. Econometrica 28:287-309. LANGE, OSKAR 1934 The Determinateness of the Utility Function. Review of Economic Studies 1:218-225. LITTLE, I. M. D. 1949 A Reformulation of the Theory of Consumer's Behaviour. Oxford Economic Papers New Series 1:90-99. LLOYD, WILLIAM F. (1833) 1927 A Lecture on the Notion of Value as Distinguishable Not Only From Utility But Also From Value in Exchange. Economic History 1:170-183. -> An introductory note by R. F. Harrod appears on pages 168-169. MARSCHAK, JACOB 1950 Rational Behavior, Uncertain Prospects, and Measurable Utility. Econometrica 18: 111-141. MARSHALL, ALFRED (1879) 1930 The Pure Theory of Foreign Trade and The Pure Theory of Domestic Values. Series of Reprints of Scarce Tracts in Economic and Political Science, No. 1. London School of Economics and Political Science. -> See especially The Pure Theory of Domestic Values. MARSHALL, ALFRED (1890) 1948 Principles of Economics. 8th ed. New York: Macmillan. MARX, KARL (1867-1879) 1925-1926 Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. 3 vols. Chicago: Kerr. -» Volume 1: The Process of Capitalist Production. Volume 2: The Process of Circulation of Capital. Volume 3: The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole. Volume 1 was published in 1867. The manuscripts of volumes 2 and 3 were written between 1867 and 1879. They were first published posthumously, in German, in 1885 and 1894. MENGER, CARL (1871) 1950 Principles of Economics: First General Part. Edited by James Dingwall and Bert F. Hoselitz, with an introduction by Frank H.
Knight. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. -> First published as Grundsatze der Volkswirthschaftslehre. MILL, JOHN STUART (1848)1961 Principles of Political Economy, With Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy. 7th ed. Edited by W. J. Ashley. New York: Kelley. MONTANARI, GEMINIANO (c. 1687) 1804 Delia moneta: Trattato mercantile. Scrittori classici italiani di economia politica, Parte antica, Vol. 3. Milan: Destefanis. NEWMAN, P. K.; and READ, R. C. 1958 Demand Theory Without a Utility Index: A Comment. Review of Economic Studies 25:197-199. PARETO, VILFREDO (1896-1897) 1964 Cours d'economie politique. New ed. Oeuvres completes, Vol. 1. Paris: Droz. -» The first edition was published in two volumes. PARETO, VILFREDO (1906) 1966 Le manuel d'economie politique. 4th ed. Oeuvres completes, Vol. 7. Geneva: Droz. -» First published in Italian. PARETO, VILFREDO (1911) 1966 Economic mathematique. Pages 319-368 in Vilfredo Pareto, Statistique et economic mathematique. Oeuvres completes, Vol. 8. Geneva: Droz. ->• First published in French, in Volume 4 of Encyclopedic des sciences mathematiques pures et appliquees. An English translation by I. J. Griffin appeared in 1955 in Volume 5 of International Economic Papers. RAMSEY, FRANK P. (1923-1928)1950 The Foundations of Mathematics and Other Logical Essays. New York: Humanities. SAMUELSON, PAUL A. 1938a A Note on the Pure Theory of Consumer's Behavior. Economica New Series 5: 61-71. -» See also pages 353-354, "An Addendum." SAMUELSON, PAUL A. 1938b The Empirical Implications of Utility Analysis. Econometrica 6:344-356. SAMUELSON, PAUL A. 1938c The Numerical Representation of Ordered Classifications and the Concept of Utility. Review of Economic Studies 6, October:65-70. SAMUELSON, PAUL A. 1942 Constancy of the Marginal Utility of Income. Pages 75-91 in Studies in Mathematical Economics and Econometrics: In Memory of Henry Schultz. Edited by Oskar Lange, Francis McIntyre, and Theodore O. Yntema. Univ. of Chicago Press. SAMUELSON, PAUL A. (1947) 1958 Foundations of Economic Analysis. Harvard Economic Studies, Vol. 80. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. -» A paperback edition was published in 1965 by Atheneum. SAMUELSON, PAUL A. 1948 Consumption Theory in Terms of Revealed Preference. Economica New Series 15:243-253. SAMUELSON, PAUL A. 1950 The Problem of Integrability in Utility Theory. Economica New Series 17:355385. SAMUELSON, PAUL A. 1952 Probability, Utility, and the Independence Axiom. Econometrica 20:670-678. SCHULTZ, HENRY 1933 Interrelations of Demand. Journal of Political Economy 41:468-512. SCHULTZ, HENRY 1938 The Theory and Measurement of Demand. Univ. of Chicago Press. SLUTSKY, EUGEN (1915) 1952 On the Theory of the Budget of the Consumer. Pages 27-56 in American Economic Association, Readings in Price Theory. Homewood, 111.: Irwin. -» First published in Volume 51 of the Giornale degli economisti, Third Series. STIGLER, GEORGE J. (1950) 1960 The Development of Utility Theory. Pages 606-655 in Joseph J. Spengler
UTOPIANISM: Utopias and Utopianism and William R. Allen (editors), Essays in Economic Thought: Aristotle to Marshall. Chicago: Rand McNally. -» First published in Volume 58 of the Journal of Political Economy. STROTZ, ROBERT H. 1956 Myopia and Inconsistency in Dynamic Utility Maximization. Review of Economic Studies 23:165-180. STROTZ, ROBERT H. 1957 The Empirical Implications of a Utility Tree. Econometrica 25:269-280. -> For a correction and a further appraisal, see Volume 27, pages 482-488 of Econometrica. TURGOT, ANNE ROBERT JACQUES (1768)1844 Valeurs et monnaies. Volume 1, pages 75-93 in Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Oeuvres de Turgot. New ed., enl. 2 vols. Collection des principaux economistes, Nos. 3 and 4. Paris: Guillaumin. UZAWA, HIROFUMI 1960 Preference and Rational Choice in the Theory of Consumption. Pages 129-148 in Stanford Symposium on Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences, Stanford University, 1959, Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences. Edited by Kenneth Arrow, Samuel Karlin, and Patrick Suppes. Stanford Univ. Press. VILLE, JEAN (1946) 1951/1952 The Existence-conditions of a Total Utility Function. Review of Economic Studies 19:123-128. -+ First published in French, in Volume 9 of the Annales de I'Universite de Lyon, Section A. VON NEUMANN, JOHN; and MORGENSTERN, OSKAR (1944) 1964 Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. 3d ed. New York: Wiley. WALRAS, LEON (1874-1877) 1954 Elements of Pure Economics: Or, the Theory of Social Wealth. Translated by William Jaffe. Homewood, 111.: Irwin; London: Allen & Unwin. -» First published as Elements d'economie politique pure. The 1954 translation is of the 1926 edition. WEBER, WILHELM; and STREISSLER, ERICH 1964 Nutzen. Volume 8, pages 1-19 in Handworterbuch der Sozialwissenschaften. Stuttgart (Germany): Fischer. WIESER, FRIEDRICH VON (1889) 1956 Natural Value. , Edited with a preface and analysis by William Smart. New York: Kelly & Millman. -» First published in German.
UTOPIANISM I. UTOPIAS AND UTOPIANISM ii. THE DESIGN OF EXPERIMENTAL COMMUNITIES
George Kateb B. F. Skinner
UTOPIAS AND UTOPIANISM
It would seem at first sight that the study of utopianism is not the study of a really delimited subject: the range of the words "utopia" and "Utopian" is very great. They are applied colloquially to any idea or proposal that may be desirable but is impractical or unrealizable, that is thought to be delusive or fatuously out of accord with reasonable expectation, or that implies a radical departure from existing conditions. More formally, these words are applied to any speculation
267
in ethical philosophy about the Good Life; or to any speculation in political theory about fundamental political principles or forms of government; or to any imaginary society found in a treatise, novel, story, or poem; or to any vision or conception of a perfect society. In the face of such variety of usage, can it be said that utopianism is the name of a single doctrine or of a coherent body of doctrines? Although "utopia" and "Utopian" mean many different things, when we speak of "utopianism" we can speak of a persistent tradition of thought about the perfect society, in which perfection is defined as harmony. The harmony is of each man with himself and of each man with all others. (Hereafter in this article, "utopia" and "Utopian" are used only in the sense pertaining to utopianism.) The word "harmony" itself is no doubt vague. It is apparent, however, that this word is merely a shorthand way of referring to a number of social conditions, each one of which is a manifestation of harmony. Among these conditions are perpetual peace; full satisfaction of human wants; either a happy labor or a rich leisure, or a combination of both; extreme equality, or inequality on a wholly rational basis; the absence of discretionary authority, or the participation of all in turn in discretionary authority, or the placing of discretionary authority in the hands of those with a clear claim to it; and a nearly effortless virtue on the part of all men. These are the conditions of Utopian life in its hypothetical descriptions; these are the conditions that a society must have if it is to be in accord with utopianism. The sources of utopianism. The primal sources of utopianism are in some of the oldest stories of the race, stories of man before the Fall, of man in the Golden Age, of man in an Arcadian state of nature. In these stories we generally find a hopeless nostalgia for a time, long in the past, when the gross evils of the real world were absent and an easy contentment marked human life. The harmony there was a natural harmony: simple men with few needs or desires led simple lives in which their needs and desires were easily satisfied. There were neither the complexities nor the anguishes of civilized existence. One could say that it is a low-level harmony that characterizes these renderings of early man. To be sure, the civilized mentality has stood ready to disparage any attempt to make of natural harmony a standard by which to judge and finally to condemn the real world. Witness the epithet which Glaucon, a young Athenian, applied to Socrates' description in Plato's Republic of the felicities of precivilized society. Glaucon
268
UTOPIANISM: Utopias and Utopianism
called such a society a "city of pigs." Witness the pleasure of Hegel in contemplating the fall of man, the expulsion of Adam from the Garden of Eden. Hegel considered the Fall a fortunate fall: True freedom, true morality, true adulthood can be built only on the basis of man's awareness and experience of sin. Witness the scorn heaped on Rousseau's head after he had written warmly of some remote state of nature where none of the institutions of civilization sullied life. His critics gloried in the variety and glitter and richness that only civilization could produce. Nevertheless, we can legitimately say that these old stories, together with more recent retellings of them (like Rousseau's), are the prefigurement of utopianism because they are the repository of the immemorial longings of the multitude of ordinary men. The theorists of utopianism, however, have usually sought to give nonnatural, civilized, fully societal equivalents of the conditions pictured in the old stories. Utopianism is actually an effort to imagine what the harmonious life would be once removed from a natural or pastoral setting. And the assumption is that the society in which the harmonious life is lived is the perfect society, in which all men would live if they could. It is not the perfect society according to the eccentric imaginings of any isolated thinker but according to the prepossessions of common humanity. Where utopianism is found. The literature on utopianism is indeed vast, but certain categories of writing stand out in importance. We may consult those political theories that go beyond a discussion of the fundamental principles of politics to a more inclusive discussion of the Good Society. Strictly speaking, Hobbes's Leviathan and Locke's Second Treatise of Civil Government are not part of the literature of utopianism because their main concern is confined to political structures; their major aim is to make society tolerable, not perfect. But Plato's Republic, parts of Aristotle's Politics, and Rousseau's Social Contract are works of political theory in the tradition of utopianism. We may also consult some of the books that give detailed descriptions of hypothetically perfect societies. Politics has, of course, a place in these books, but not the centrality given it in political theories. Examples of this sort would be Sir Thomas More's Utopia, Campanella's The City of the Sun, Morelly's Code de la nature, William Morris' News from Nowhere, and H. G. Wells's A Modern Utopia. We may also consult those philosophies of history that are, at the same time, philosophies of inevitable progress. In this connection, the writings of Turgot, Condorcet, Hegel, Spencer, and Marx would be
relevant. Finally, we may consult works that, although they may not deal with the institutions of the Good Society, engage in speculation about either the essential quality of the Good Life or desirable changes in the character or psychic structure of human beings as we know them, for example, Schiller's On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Mill's On Liberty, and Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization. Variety within utopianism. If we compare these numerous expressions of utopianism, we must be struck by their enormous variety. When, therefore, we speak of a tradition of utopianism, all we can mean is that a number of thinkers, through the centuries, have shared a dedication to the idea of harmony. We cannot mean that these thinkers have been of one mind on the social practices and institutions most appropriate to harmony or on the smaller details and arrangements of Utopian life. Part of the explanation for these divergences is to be found in the fact that the conditions of the real world, which influence the Utopian imagination in its devisings of perfection, are obviously not constant; hence, the devisings themselves cannot be constant. Of special importance are the level of technology and the state of scientific knowledge. As these change, thought about perfection must change. New possibilities disclose themselves. Whether, for example, material abundance can be taken for granted will determine the Utopian attitude toward the satisfaction of human wants. Will the effort be made, in the perfect society, to limit the number of human wants and achieve the satisfaction of austerity, or will human wants be allowed to multiply because it is supposed that the means are on hand to indulge them? The aim of both procedures—and they are both found in the tradition of utopianism—is to eliminate the gap between wanting and having. But the way to eliminate that gap, in a hypothetically perfect society, will depend on the economic and technological assumptions that a Utopian thinker makes. Not only the conditions of the real world work on the Utopian imagination and account for the great differences in descriptions of perfection. The beliefs held on such an issue as the capacity of improved conditions of life and improved techniques of education to reform human nature will also play a prominent part in determining the peculiarities of a given version of the harmonious society. If a Utopian writer thinks that all social arrangements are powerless to cancel innate inequalities of human endowment, he will purchase harmony at the cost of rigid social stratification, with discretionary authority confined to a few. If,
UTOPIANISM: Utopias and Utopianism on the other hand, he thinks that innate inequalities shrink in importance before the potency of new social and educational practices, then the whole problem of authority and social regulation will take on a different aspect; full democracy, perhaps even anarchism, may emerge as plausible systems. Furthermore, a Utopian writer's beliefs in the ability of improved social conditions to produce a society whose virtue is certain and whose practice of it is nearly effortless will be decisive in the formulation of his Utopian ideas. Human nature seems to be less tractable to some Utopian writers than to others. Then too, the moral sensibilities of writers in the tradition of utopianism have differed from each other. Consequently, the Utopias have differed from each other. Shall the harmonious society be one in which public affairs or private pursuits occupy the dominant energies of the people? Does the life of craft or the life of play comport best with human happiness? Shall there be a single definition of the Good Life in the Good Society, or should the premise be that once radical evil is removed from society, each man should be left free to take advantage of the resources of Utopian society in his own way and define the Good Life for himself? Obviously, there is ample room for disagreement in answering these questions. Yet all those who disagree can still adhere to utopianism. In sum, the history of utopianism is made up of the efforts to present images of societies in which harmony is the controlling value. In these societies, harmony is achieved through varying institutions and arrangements; but harmony remains the common aim. The uses of utopianism. Of what value is this tradition of utopianism? Is it anything other than a record of escape from reality, a sorry sequence of daydream and fantasy? Is it of any more relevance to the business of the real world than the stories (of nature and the Golden Age) from which the tradition derives? Several answers may be given. First, utopianism has, from time to time, criticized with great power the serious deficiencies of the real world. This is not to say that whenever important changes or reforms have been made, a Utopian writing has played a prominent role. It is only to say that Utopian literature is a contribution to the conscience of society: it can create a diffuse dissatisfaction; it can stimulate the spirit that probes without mercy into existing weaknesses. The Utopian works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe performed these tasks especially well. Perhaps Marxism is the only Utopian,
269
or quasi-utopian, body of thought that large numbers of men have actually tried to translate into practice. But Marxism is not the only version of utopianism that has worked to generate the feeling that the real world is profoundly imperfect and that some sort of change, even small, and not even in a Utopian direction, is a pressing necessity. Second, the literature of utopianism, taken as a whole, enriches the sense of human possibility. There are many kinds of writing that also do the same thing: history, anthropological descriptions, and works of poetry and fiction from different cultures and times. All these make vivid the fact that any given society does not—cannot—exploit the full riches of human nature; each society, obviously, elicits and develops some qualities, while ignoring or suppressing others. Each society does not—cannot—contain all possible character types, all possible social roles, and all possible varieties of human experience. Utopianism does its share of reminding society that society is limited and that, although society may be, to some degree, pleased with itself, other forms and ways of life are imaginable. In short, utopianism helps to give perspective by giving contrast. Third, many Utopian books are, in effect, comprehensive sociologies and improve our understanding of social relations in much the same way as large-scale studies of real societies. To see a mind in the act of creating a complex hypothetical society, made up of many institutions and the institutions, in turn, bound together and conditioning each other, is to be led back to the basic problems of social analysis. The rewards are great of having a whole society laid out before one, even though that society be imaginary. Our eyes are trained for looking at totalities. Naturally a good deal of exclusion and oversimplification characterize the Utopian sociologies. That is the price paid for abstraction, but a price not paid by Utopian writers alone and a price sometimes worth paying. Modern utopianism. Apart from these three continuing uses of utopianism, there is a peculiarly modern one. For the past century or so, diverse thinkers—including H. G. Wells, Arnold Toynbee, Lewis Mumford, and B. F. Skinner—have concluded that utopianism is meant to be realized in the world. (At the same time, even though Marxism has traditionally derided Utopian fancy and purports to be scientific analysis only, the Marxists have done much to arouse Utopian expectation throughout the world.) Many men have said or implied that utopianism hardly begins its work when it contributes in a general way to the conscience of society, enriches the sense of human
270
UTOPIANISM: Utopias and Utopianism
possibility, and improves the understanding of social relations. Although these things matter greatly, there is something that matters more; that is to convince the world that for the first time in human history a society embodying the principles of utopianism is genuinely conceivable. Advances in technology, in the techniques of abundance, in the techniques of social efficiency, and in the sciences of psychology and genetics make it reasonable to think that a harmonious life for all men on the globe can be had in the foreseeable future. The key to Utopia is the rational use of resources, skills, and knowledge, free from the constrictions of the system of nation-states. Failing that, the alternative is either chaos or the nightmare-state. More and more, with time, it will be seen that the choices will narrow to two: heaven or hell. Thus, some would wish to show that the only doctrine suited to modern reality is, paradoxically enough, utopianism. In a world in which nation-states compete for the usual stakes, but especially for security, the result must eventually be one kind of disaster or another. What is more, the alternative, in theory at least, is not a lesser evil, but a great good, the greatest of secular goods, the Good Society. To get the world to see itself in this way, then, is thought by some to be the highest mission of Utopian thinkers. The antiutopian reaction. One of the most interesting tendencies in recent thought has been the growth of antiutopianism, which, like modern utopianism, is based on the conviction that men will soon have at their disposal the means to build Utopia. Antiutopian writers deplore the idea of a harmonious society characterized by perpetual peace, the satisfaction of human wants, and a nearly effortless virtue. It would not be correct to say that antiutopianism is a doctrine; rather it is an aggregate of ideas, sentiments, feelings, and prejudices directed at various aspects of the idea of a Utopian society. The roots of antiutopianism are to be found in the writings of Dostoevski and Nietzsche. Dostoevski's Notes from the Underground and passages in his novels The Possessed and The Idiot display a number of antiutopian sentiments: the life of risk, of uncertainty, of suffering, of inexplicable will, and of spirituality is championed at the expense of the Utopian life, which is seen as stultifying. Scattered throughout Nietzsche's writings are ideas that mock Utopia (explicitly or implicitly) by praising heroism, excess, and grandeur of soul. More recent writers, like Evgenii Zamiatin in his novel We and Aldous Huxley in his novel Brave New World, have continued what Nietzsche and
Dostoevski began. But where the target of Nietzsche and Dostoevski was utopianism, the target of Zamiatin, Huxley, and others might be called "pseudoutopianism," that is, a debased utopianism in which its traditional aims are carried to an unacceptable extreme. Not that Zamiatin and Huxley would wish to say that Utopian values are inherently bad, but Utopian values like peace, material satisfaction, and ease in virtue lend themselves, as all values may, to perversion. Peace can become a rigid fixity; material satisfaction can lead to a bestial contentment; and ease in virtue can be achieved at the expense of the adult moral faculties. The effect of this critique of utopianism is cautionary; it is to help the apologists of utopianism remember that there is a difference between a low-level harmony and a high-level harmony, and that if the latter is unattainable—for whatever mixture of reasons—the real world, in all its confusion and sorrow, is better than the former. GEORGE KATEB [See also LITERATURE, article on POLITICAL FICTION; SOCIAL SCIENCE FICTION; and the biographies of PLATO and ROUSSEAU.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
BUBER, MARTIN (1947) 1950 Paths in Utopia. New York: Macmillan. -» First published in Hebrew. BURY, JOHN B. (1920) 1960 The Idea of Progress. Gloucester, Mass.: Smith. COHN, NORMAN (1957) 1961 The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Messianism in Medieval and Reformation Europe and Its Bearing on Modern Totalitarian Movements. 2d ed. New York: Harper. GRAY, ALEXANDER 1946 The Socialist Tradition: Moses to Lenin. London: Longmans. HORSBURGH, H. J. N. 1957 The Relevance of the Utopian. Ethics 67:127-138. KAUTSKY, KARL (1895)1947 Die Vorldufer des neueren Sozialismus. 2d ed., enl. Stuttgart (Germany): Dietz. LOVEJOY, ARTHUR O. et al. 1935 Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity. Johns Hopkins University Documentary History of Primitivism and Related Ideas, Vol. 1. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press; Oxford Univ. Press. MANNHEIM, KARL (1929-1931) 1954 Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Harcourt; London: Routledge. -> First published in German. A paperback edition was published in 1955 by Harcourt. MUMFORD, LEWIS 1956 The Transformations of Man. New York: Harper. NEGLEY, GLENN; and PATRICK, J. MAX (editors) 1952 The Quest for Utopia. New York: Schuman. POLAR, FREDERIK L. (1955) 1961 The Image of the Future: Enlightening the Past, Orientating the Present, Forecasting the Future. 2 vols. Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.: Oceana. -> First published as De toekomst is verleden tijd. Volume 1: The Promised Land: Source of Living Culture. Volume 2: Iconoclasm of the Images of the Future: Demolition of Culture.
UTOPIANISM: The Design of Experimental Communities POPPER, KARL R. (1945) 1963 The Open Society and Its Enemies. 2 vols., 4th ed., rev. Princeton Univ. Press. -* Volume 1: The Spell of Plato. Volume 2: The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx and the Aftermath. II THE DESIGN OF EXPERIMENTAL COMMUNITIES
A community may be thought of as a small state, even a miniature world, in which some of the problems of implementing a way of life are reduced to manageable size. Many kinds of communities have served this purpose. Although seemingly successful unplanned cultures have often been taken as models (Arcadia by the Greeks, the South Sea islands by the eighteenth-century social philosophers), this article is concerned with communities which have been or might be explicitly designed. Some of the rules of the Qumran Community were set forth in the Manual of Discipline found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, which the community helped to preserve. The rules of Benedict and Augustine governed life in similar monastic communities. Semireligious and secular communities flourished in the nineteenth century in America (the Oneida Community is a particularly interesting example). Explicitly designed, or intentional, communities of the twentieth century range from the intensely religious Bruderhof to the essentially secular kibbutzim in Israel. The Soviet collectives and mikroraions and the Chinese communes, though parts of larger governmental structures, are other examples. Fictional communities—for example, those described in Thomas More's Utopia (1516) and Francis Bacon's New Atlantis (1627)—have also captured men's imaginations. In its relation to government in the broadest sense, a community, speculative or attempted, serves something of the function of a pilot experiment in science or a pilot model or plant in technology. It is constructed on a small scale. Certain problems arising from sheer size—such as communication and transportation—-can then be neglected, but the main advantage is that closer attention can be given to the lives of individual members. Such a community is also almost always geographically isolated. Utopias have often occupied islands, but walls isolate almost as well as water. (The members of a sect, no matter how well organized, are not usually regarded as a community if they are widely dispersed geographically.) There is also a certain isolation from tradition. The eighteenthcentury European could expect to abandon much of his culture when he reached Tahiti; life in a monastery may begin with a ritual of rebirth. All this makes it easier to think about such a com-
271
munity as a viable or perishable entity—as an organism with a life of its own. Its success or failure, unlike the rise and fall of eras or nations, is likely to be quick and conspicuous. New ways of doing things are tested for their bearing on its success. Such a community, in short, is an experiment. Men found, join, or dream of such communities for many reasons. Some are moved by intellectual interests: they want to prove a theory (for example, that men are naturally noble or that they are incomplete without "community" or "love") or to hasten a prophesied stage in history. Others have more immediate personal reasons: they seek simple pleasures, the satisfaction of basic needs, political order, economic stability, help in self-discipline, and so on. Such goals are often formalized as "values." The goal of the community is to maximize happiness, security, sanctity, or personal fulfillment. The more general the goal, however, the more debatable it seems to be. In conceiving of a community as a pilot experiment, the designer may turn directly to two practical questions: What behavior on the part of the members of a community is most likely to contribute to its success? How may that behavior be generated and maintained? Some answers to the first question are quite obvious. It is important to a community that its members defend it against its enemies, produce the food, shelter, clothing, and other things it needs, and maintain internal order. It is also obviously important that its members teach each other, and, particularly, new members, how to behave in necessary ways. Other kinds of behavior—for example, in the uses of leisure—often figure prominently among expressed goals, but their relevance to the success of a community is not always clear. These behaviors are things members "want to do," and various reasons may be given for doing them, but the designer may proceed most effectively by confining himself to behaviors that are demonstrably related to success or survival. The second question has usually been answered by appeal to historical analogy. Men have lived peacefully, productively, stably, and happily under many observed systems or structures of government, economics, society, family life, and so on. There is a strong presumption that a given system generates the behavior observed under it, as political science, economics, sociology, and other social disciplines usually contend. We might conclude, therefore, that the designer has only to choose among systems or structures. Should the government of a community be authoritarian or democratic? Should the society be open or closed? Should
272
UTOPIANISM: The Design of Experimental Communities
the social structure be classless or stratified? Should the economy be planned or laissez-faire? Should the family be strong or weak? Questions at this level of analysis offer little practical help in designing a community. Terms like "authoritarian" and "laissez-faire" seldom refer to properties which a designer can build into a social environment, and terms like "peaceful" and "stable" do not sharply characterize behavior which can be shown to contribute to the success of such an environment. There is a more useful level of analysis. Every developed language contains terms which describe in great detail the social environment and the behavior it generates. Rules of thumb useful in modifying behavior are expressed in such terms. Thus, everyone knows how to attract a man's attention, to arouse him emotionally, to reward and punish him, and so on. Communities are usually designed with an eye to this level of human behavior. The designer is concerned not with a hypothetical type of economic system but with actual working conditions, not with a hypothetical type of government but with ethical practices and instructions in selfdiscipline, not with a formal conception of social or family structure but with specific interactions among the members of a group. The relations between behavior and environment at this level have only recently been formulated in a systematic way. It is significant that statements expressing an understanding of human nature or a skill in handling people—for example, in the essays of such men as Bacon or Montaigne or in sporadic comments by political scientists, economists, and others—have remained aphoristic. They have never been brought together in a coherent, consistent account. Psychology is the scientific discipline relevant here, but it has only recently been able to supply an effective alternative to folklore and personal experience. A special branch of psychology has now reached the point at which promising technological applications are becoming feasible. The principles derived from an experimental analysis of behavior offer the designer considerable help in setting up an environment under which behavior which will contribute to the success of the community may be generated. At any level of analysis, certain conditions either lie beyond the control of the designer or, if used by him to advantage, limit the significance of his design as a general solution. He cannot actually institute a new culture all at once: the earlier social environments of the members of a community will play a role, if only in providing a contrast to a new way of life. Members may show personal idiosyncrasies or background differences. They may have
been explicitly selected—and will almost certainly be self-selected—with respect to some such trait as cooperativeness or intelligence. The site of the community—its climate, soil, and existing flora and fauna—will be favorable or unfavorable. The community will begin with a certain amount of starting capital, it will have natural resources, and it may continue to receive outside support in the form of charity or philanthropy. All these conditions limit the significance of a successful result, but there is still scope for extensive design. A few examples must suffice here. Negative reinforcement. An important element in any culture is the use of force. The state is often defined primarily in terms of the power to punish. We say that punishment requires force because its imposition is resisted. In political theory the right and power to punish are discussed under some such concept as "sovereignty." The behavioral processes are obvious and easily related to the role of punishment. The term applies, strictly speaking, only to the suppression of unwanted behavior, but the punishing events used for that purpose can be used to generate behavior—to induce people to behave in given ways by "punishing them for not behaving." The technique is particularly useful in offsetting other aversive consequences, as in forcing men to fight or to fill production quotas. Effectively used, punishment in this broad sense can make men law-abiding, obedient, and dutiful. [See MENTAL DISORDERS, TREATMENT OF, article on BEHAVIOR THERAPY.] But there are inevitable side effects. One who is behaving well in order to escape punishment may simply escape in other ways, as exemplified by military desertion and religious apostasy. Extensive use of punishment will cost a community some of its members. It may also lead to counterattack— as in revolution or religious reformation—or to stubborn resistance to all forms of control. These are familiar, predictable reactions upon which an experimental analysis of behavior throws considerable light. A slow, erratic trend toward minimizing aversive control in the design of a community is actually an example of such a by-product. This trend is exemplified when powerful military or police action is replaced by ethical control imposed by those with whom the citizen is in immediate contact or when educational programs are designed to reduce the frequency with which aversive behavior occurs or to prepare the individual to adjust more effectively to any remaining forcible control. An example of a more extreme alternative is the cloister, an environment in which unwanted behavior is unlikely or impossible and in which
UTOPIANISM: The Design of Experimental Communities wanted behavior is particularly likely to occur [see MONASTICISM]. Positive reinforcement. A very different example of the relevance of an analysis of behavior to the design of a community is the use of so-called rewards. A community may need as much power to reward as to punish, but it is not said to be using force because its operations are not resisted. Reward refers very loosely to the "positive reinforcers" which have been extensively analyzed in laboratory research. It is a basic principle that behavior which is followed by certain kinds of consequences is more likely to occur again, but reinforcements may be contingent on behavior in many subtle and complex ways, and extensive technological knowledge is needed to use the principle effectively in all its ramifications. Although it is generally true that the greater the reinforcement the more it is productive of behavior, the amount of behavior generated is not related in any simple way to the amount of reinforcement. The net gain or utility of an action has little relation to the probability that the action will occur. Indeed, under certain contingencies of reinforcement—for example, in gambling—behavior may be maintained at a high level for long periods of time even though the net monetary gain is negative. A community may resort to positive reinforcement to generate any behavior important to its success. For example, it may arrange for reinforcement through group approval of accepted behavior as an alternative to coercive legal or ethical control. It will also be interested, of course, in the classical problem of maintaining productive labor. (If there is any established discipline which is most closely concerned with positive reinforcement, it is economics.) The designer of effective working conditions in a small community is in a favorable position to use a technology of reinforcement. The immediate temporal contingencies are crucial. Many communities have given special attention to rewarding productive labor. Some have returned to conditions which prevail in the life of the craftsman—that is, they have used the natural reinforcing consequences of labor. It is not a very enlightened solution. Furthermore, the use of money as a reinforcement is admittedly not as simple as it may at first appear. The value of money must, of course, be taught—but so must the value of early stages of craftwork. The main difficulty is that wages are artificially contingent upon the behavior which produces them, and it has been difficult to construct contingencies which maintain productive labor without undesirable side effects. It was once thought that the deficiency must be offset by making wages
273
more powerful as reinforcers—for example, by maintaining a hungry labor force. Another solution has been to increase the actual amount of reinforcement (by raising wages). The contingencies of reinforcement have remained poorly analyzed, however. Current systems of rewards are largely aversive, the threatened loss of a standard of living being more important than the receipt of wages. Effective reinforcement of productive labor is one of the more interesting areas in which the designer of an experimental community may apply recent scientific discoveries. [See WAGES.] When goods and services which may be used as reinforcers are allowed to become available for other reasons—when, for example, they are supplied by a bountiful nature or a bountiful government concerned with welfare or happiness—much of their reinforcing effect is lost. We make explicit use of this principle when, as an alternative to punishment, we deliberately destroy contingencies by supplying reinforcers gratis—for example, when we give men the things they would otherwise behave illegally to get. If the community does not need productive work, reinforcing contingencies can safely be neglected, but a long-standing conflict between welfare and incentive suggests that the issue has not been wholly resolved. Leisure. Positive reinforcement occupies an especially important place in solving the problem of leisure. With modern technology it is conceivable that a man need not spend much time in making his contribution to peace and prosperity. What is he to do with the rest of his time? Perhaps it does not matter. If the community has solved the essential problems of daily life, it may leave each member free to do as he pleases. But he is free only to come under other forms of control. If there are no effective reinforcers, he may spend all his waking hours doing nothing. Or he may come under the sustained control of biological reinforcers, such as food, sex, aggressive damage to others, or drug-induced euphoric states. Weaker reinforcers will take control when they occur on powerful schedules: leisure is often spent in repetitive and compulsive activities, such as solitaire or other simple games. [See LEISURE.] These are all forms of behavior which flourish when behaviors having a more specific relevance to the success of a community are not needed. A community may be able to afford a certain number of them, but it stands to profit more from other uses of free time. Sports, games, and other forms of complex play; arts and crafts, music, and the dance; literature and the theater; and the contemplation, observation, and exploration of nature
274
UTOPIANISM: The Design of Experimental Communities
which constitute "science" in the broadest sense are important activities to the designer because they bear on the success of the community. Some of them make the community more attractive in the sense that they reinforce supporting behavior and discourage defection. For example, they reinforce the simple behavior of remaining in the community. Other activities develop extraordinary skills which make it possible for members to meet emergencies with maximum effectiveness. Those which advance science yield the physical and cultural technologies needed for the maintenance and improvement of the community as a way of life. These relations to the success of a community are overlooked in saying that leisure is to be devoted to the pursuit of happiness, for this emphasizes the reinforcers rather than the behaviors reinforced. The concept of "happiness" (or, less frivolously, "fulfillment" or "enrichment") is often felt to be a necessary, if admittedly troublesome, value in explaining man's search for a way of life. From the point of view of an experimental analysis of behavior, it appears to be merely an awkward way of representing the roles of positive and negative reinforcers. Its main fault is its neglect of the contingencies of reinforcement. Asked to describe a world in which he would like to live, a man will often refer directly to reinforcing conditions—freedom from aversive stimulation and an abundance of positive reinforcers—but he then finds himself unprepared for many paradoxes, such as the often encountered unhappiness of those "who have everything" or, in that other field of Utopian speculation, man's failure to conceive of an interesting heaven. In summary, then, a community is much more complex than a laboratory experiment in human behavior but much simpler than the large-scale enterprises analyzed in political science, economics, and other social disciplines. For this reason it is especially helpful in studying the effects of a social environment on human behavior and, in return, the relevance of that behavior to the maintenance and development of the environment. It is a favorable ground for social invention. A surprising number of practices first described in Utopian thinking have eventually been adopted on a broader scale. In writing the New Atlantis (1627), Francis Bacon could imagine that scientists might be organized to solve the problems of the community. Only after he had made such an organization plausible was the Royal Society founded—and quite clearly on Bacon's model. More general principles are also encouraged. The success or failure of a community,
for example, is easily seen to mean the success or failure of all its members, whether or not its social structure is egalitarian; but it is hard to reach a similar sense of community in thinking about a nation or the world as a whole. It has been suggested that the well-governed Greek city-state, by permitting men to conceive of an orderly world of nature, led to the development of Greek science. Little in the world today could have that effect, for the order is now clearly on the side of science. But if the principles which are emerging from the laboratory study of human behavior can be shown to be relevant, then science may repay its debt by bringing order back into human affairs. B. F. SKINNER [Directly related are the entries LEARNING, articles on INSTRUMENTAL
LEARNING
and
REINFORCEMENT.
Other relevant material may be found in COMMUNITY; GROUPS; LEISURE; SOCIAL CONTRACT; SOCIAL CONTROL; SOCIAL MOVEMENTS; SOCIAL SCIENCE FICTION; STIMULATION DRIVES; and in the biographies of BACON; ROUSSEAU.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
BACON, FRANCIS (1627) 1952 New Atlantis. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica. -> A fragmentary description of a state profiting from a scientific society "instituted for the interpreting of nature and the production of great and marvelous works for the benefit of man." BELLAMY, EDWARD (1888) 1951 Looking Backward, 2000-1887. New York: Modern Library. -> An economic Utopia depicting Boston in the year 2000. CABET, ETIENNE (1842) 1848 Voyage en Icarie. 5th ed. Paris: Au Bureau du Populaire. -> A post-Rousseauan Utopia that the author tried to realize by coming to America with a group of followers to set up a community in the Midwest. DARIN-DRABKIN, HAIM 1963 The Other Society. New York: Harcourt. -> An analysis of the kibbutzim in Israel. GOODMAN, PERCIVAL; and GOODMAN, PAUL (1947) 1960 Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life. Rev. ed. New York: Vintage. -> Emphasizes architecture and town planning. HUXLEY, ALDOUS (1932) 1958 Brave New World. New York: Harper. -> A satirical portrait of the scientifically planned society and a sympathetic account of the fate of the individual. The first of the behavioral Utopias, it exploits the conditioned reflex. KATEB, GEORGE 1963 Utopia and Its Enemies. New York: Free Press. -» An analysis of antiutopian writing, mostly modern. KRUTCH, JOSEPH WOOD 1954 The Measure of Man: On Freedom, Human Values, Survival, and the Modern Temper. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill. -» A critical discussion of freedom and human values in a planned society. MANUEL, FRANK E. (editor) 1966 Utopias and Utopian Thought. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. -» A symposium on current Utopian speculation.
UTOPIANISM: The Design of Experimental Communities MORE, THOMAS (1516)1966 The Complete Works of St. Thomas More. Volume 4: Utopia. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. -» The archetypal pattern for all Utopias. NEGLEY, GLENN; and PATRICK, J. MAX (editors) 1952 The Quest for Utopia. New York: Schuman. -» A critical analysis of fictional communities. NORDHOFF, CHARLES (1875) 1965 The Communistic Societies of the United States. New York: Schocken. -» A firsthand account of communities such as the Harmonists, the Shakers, and the Oneida Perfectionists. NOYES, PIERPONT 1937 My Father's House: An Oneida Boyhood. New York: Farrar & Rinehart. -> A nostalgic account of the author's boyhood in the Oneida Community. ORWELL, GEORGE 1949 1984. New York: Harcourt. -* A mordant picture of the Western world as a police
275
state controlled by propaganda, spying, and punishment. A paperback edition was published in 1963. SKINNER, B. F. 1948 Walden Two. New York: Macmillan. -> A nonsatirical behavioral Utopia. A paperback edition was published in 1965. ROUSSEAU, JEAN JACQUES (1762)1961 The Social Contract. London: Dent. -> First published in French. Utopian speculation concerning the sources of authority. SPIRO, MELFORD E. 1956 Kibbutz: Venture in Utopia. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. -> Report of a study of an Israeli kibbutz in 1951. WILSON, WILLIAM E. 1964 The Angel and the Serpent: The Story of New Harmony. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press. -> A history of the communities established in New Harmony, Indiana, first by George Rapp and then by Robert Owen.
VAILLANT, GEORGE C. George Clapp Vaillant (1901-1945) was an American anthropologist who combined the methods, techniques, and findings of ethnology, ethnohistory, and especially archeology in the study of problems of the development of the American aboriginal high civilizations. The bulk of his work, in both quantity and significance, concerns the cultures of Central Mexico, from the villages of the Early Formative to the brilliant, highly complex Aztec civilization. His major publications, although not lacking in theoretical import, are noteworthy primarily for the extensive and original field research they reflect. Graduate study at Harvard under A. M. Tozzer fostered Vaillant's interest in the civilization of the ancient Maya, an interest which developed into his doctoral dissertation, "The Chronological Significance of Maya Ceramics" (1927). The sequence postulated by Vaillant for the site of Holmul, Guatemala, formed the basis for the refinements of subsequent scholars. Although this important work was not published in its entirety during his lifetime (a major section, revised in collaboration with R. E. Merwin, appeared in 1932), it was privately circulated and its significance immediately appreciated by scholars in the field; the Holmul sequence was the first ceramic chronology of the Maya area. Vaillant's Maya researches include field work at the Toltec Maya site of Chichen Itza, Yucatan, in 1926, sponsored by the Carnegie Institution of Washington and directed by S. G. Morley. The stratigraphic midden excavations made by Vaillant provided the basis for later ceramic studies by
H. B. Roberts and G. W. Brainerd. After his pioneering Maya studies, however, Vaillant's interest came to focus chiefly upon the Central Mexican area. During the first decade of the twentieth century a tentative relative chronology of three general cultural stages had been established for Central Mexico. Based on chance discoveries of Archaic figurines beneath the lava flow of the Pedregal in the Distrito Federal, the chronological priority of that stage had been suggested by Nuttall and confirmed by stratigraphic excavations by Boas and Gamio in 1910 and subsequently by Tozzer. The sequence was Archaic (Formative, or Pre-Classic, in later terminology), Toltec, Aztec. The chronological as well as typological priority of the Archaic suggested to Spinden and others that this stage represented the basis from which all the advanced cultures of the New World derived. However, American anthropological theory as a whole, including archeological theory, was, during the first three decades of the twentieth century, in reaction against the universal generalizations of the nineteenth-century evolutionists. In ethnology the reaction took the form of historical particularism; in archeology one aspect of this reaction was the position that none of the cultures of the New World had any great time depth. The entire known Mexican sequence was therefore compressed into a period of time beginning only shortly before the birth of Christ. Archeologists maintained this exceptionally conservative absolute chronology in spite of the clear evidence of the depth of the refuse deposits and the complexity of the sequence of cultures represented. Further archeological evidence suggesting a far longer duration had already
277
278
VAILLANT, GEORGE C.
been provided by Cook, who in 1927 discovered at Folsom, New Mexico, human artifacts in association with extinct Pleistocene fauna. By the mid-1930s, largely on the basis of Vaillant's extensive stratigraphic work on the Formative cultures of the Valley of Mexico, an expanded system of nomenclature was established. The Archaic was revealed to be not a single stylistic unit, as Spinden's Archaic Hypothesis had postulated, but rather a complex series of cultures. Variants of this stage, identified in many parts of Mesoamerica, confirmed it as indeed basic to the entire area, although far from completely uniform in all its manifestations. Vaillant conducted a series of important excavations at several rich Formative sites: El Arbolillo (1935a), Zacatenco (1930), Ticoman (1931), and Gualupita (Vaillant & Vaillant 1934). On the basis of the rich stratified refuse deposits at these sites, he recognized Early, Middle, and Late phases of the Formative. His relative chronology was founded generally on ceramics and specifically on figurine types, of which his descriptive classification still stands as a definitive work (1935£>). In much of this work Vaillant was assisted by his wife, Suzannah Beck Vaillant, whom he married in 1930. Although recent research has demonstrated the greater complexity of the Pre-Classic sequence, the basic chronological framework for the Valley of Mexico remains that of Vaillant. His conservative absolute chronology has, however, been superseded by more reasonable dates (supported by the evidence of radiocarbon) for the beginnings of the Early Formative of at least 1500 and perhaps 2000 B.C. It was also evident to Vaillant that the Archaic cultures were themselves far too complex and too technologically sophisticated to represent the true beginnings of culture in Mesoamerica. Vaillant's recognition of this fact is reflected in his adoption of the term "middle cultures" for this stage and his postulation of the existence of simpler, earlier antecedents, unknown at the time. Recent excavations have confirmed this hypothesis and are still bringing to light these pre-Formative cultures. Vaillant's interests encompassed later as well as earlier stages of Mexican cultural development. He initiated field studies at the primarily Aztec sites of Nonoalco, Chiconauhtla, and Azcapotzalco and at the Classic city of Teotihuacan, then considered to be Toltec. At Teotihuacan he identified the Mazapan complex and recognized it as postdating the fall of the city. Unfortunately, his findings at these sites have never been published in full, although some of the data are summarized in his Aztecs of Mexico (1941). This volume is far
broader in scope than its title implies; it correctly views Aztec culture not as a civilization without antecedents but rather as the end product of long cultural development in the Valley of Mexico—a cultural development more complex and of longer duration than Vaillant himself apparently suspected. Much of the work's methodological importance lies in its reliance upon ethnohistorical and ethnological materials to supplement purely archeological data. In 1927 Vaillant had joined the staff of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and much of his research was supported and published by that institution. He also taught at Columbia University, New York University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale. In 1941 he became director of the University Museum in Philadelphia. The following year he organized a research program in Central America and South America for the Institute of Andean Research. He served in 1943-1944 as cultural attache of the United States Embassy in Peru; he had been appointed to a similar post in Spain at the time of his death by suicide. Despite the fundamental soundness of much of Vaillant's original field data, more recent research has rendered essentially untenable many of his theoretical positions and his interpretations of much substantive data. Even in the Aztecs, his last book, Vaillant still maintained his unduly compressed absolute chronology. His view of Aztec sociopolitical organization, which was essentially that first put forth by Bandelier and Morgan, has been superseded. Aztec society is now viewed not as an egalitarian "primitive democracy"—a more complex League of the Iroquois—but instead as a true political state based upon stratification into social classes. Perhaps the principal substantive weakness of the Aztecs, however, is the erroneous identification of the enormous site of Teotihuacan with the Toltec capital of Tollan. In Aztec legend, the Toltecs were considered the civilizers of ancient Mexico, and the existence of an entire cultural stage—the Classic—i^tedating the Toltec, had not been suspected. Painstaking ethnohistorical research by the Mexican scholar Jimenez Moreno identified Tollan as Tula, Hidalgo—as already suspected by Desire Charnay in the late nineteenth century. Jorge Acosta's subsequent excavations at Tula confirmed the identification beyond any doubt and revealed the Toltec identity of the Mazapan complex found at Teotihuacan overlying Classic materials. Strong resemblances were also noted between Tula and the Toltec Maya settlement at
VALUE, LABOR THEORY OF Chichen Itza, further substantiating the identification of Tula with the legendary Tollan. Vaillant's careful stratigraphic excavations of Formative sites in the Valley of Mexico remain his most enduring contribution to Mexican archeology. This pioneer research stimulated the work of later scholars who refined Vaillant's framework; but the principal outlines of that framework stand essentially as he himself conceived them. Many of Vaillant's predictions have been confirmed by later research. Earlier antecedents of the Formative are presently being excavated and described. The Middle Formative complex he recognized as distinctive at Gualupita, Morelos, was subsequently termed Olmec when related materials were recovered by later work in Veracruz and Tabasco. More recently the Gualupita collections have been found to be most closely related to those from other Middle Formative sites in the Mexican Highlands—Tlatilco, Las Bocas, Tlapacoyan, Chalcatzingo. While this Highland complex shows certain stylistic affiliations with the contemporary Olmec of the Gulf Coast, the two have been clearly distinguished; the Highland group has been designated Amacusac (Sanders & Price 1968), with the term Olmec reserved for the Lowland Gulf Coast complex. S. K. LOTHROP AND BARBARA J. PRICE
[For discussion of the subsequent development of Vaillant's ideas, see URBAN REVOLUTION, article on EARLY CIVILIZATIONS OF THE NEW WORLD; and
the
biographies of KIDDER and TOZZER.] WORKS BY VAILLANT
1927
The Chronological Significance of Maya Ceramics. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard Univ. 1930 Excavations at Zacatenco. American Museum of Natural History, Anthropological Papers, Vol. 32, part 1. New York: The Trustees. 1931 Excavations at Ticoman. American Museum of Natural History, Anthropological Papers, Vol. 32, part 2. New York: The Trustees. 1932 MERWIN, RAYMOND E.; and VAILLANT, GEORGE C. The Ruins of Holmul, Guatemala. Harvard Univ., Peahody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Memoirs, Vol. 3, no. 2. Cambridge, Mass.: The Museum. -> Part of this book consists of Vaillant's 1927 dissertation, revised in collaboration with Merwin. 1934 VAILLANT, GEORGE C.; and VAILLANT, SUZANNAH Excavations at Gualupita. American Museum of Natural History, Anthropological Papers, Vol. 35, part 1. New York: The Museum. 1935a Excavations at El Arbolillo. American Museum of Natural History, Anthropological Papers, Vol. 35, part 2. New York: The Museum. 1935b Early Cultures of the Valley of Mexico: Results of the Stratigraphical Project of the American Museum of Natural History in the Valley of Mexico, 1928-1933.
279
American Museum of Natural History, Anthropological Papers, Vol. 35, part 3. New York: The Museum. (1941) 1962 Aztecs of Mexico: Origin, Rise and Fall of the Aztec Nation. Rev. ed. American Museum of Natural History, Science Series, Vol. 2. Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday. -> A paperback edition was published in 1950 by Penguin. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY KIDDER, A. V. (compiler) 1945 Bibliography [of George C. Vaillant's works]. American Anthropologist New Series 47, no. 4:598-602. SANDERS, WILLIAM T.; and PRICE, BARBARA J. 1968 Mesoamerica: The Evolution of a Civilization. New York: Random House.
VALIDITY See ERRORS; EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN; PSYCHOMETRICS. VALUE See UTILITY. VALUE, LABOR THEORY OF The labor theory of value is the general name given to a set of economic doctrines developed by the English classical school, particularly Adam Smith and David Ricardo, and adopted by Karl Marx. Very loosely, it states that the value of goods is derived from labor, and, in its socialistic versions, that the laborer is therefore exploited when he does not receive the full value of all production. It is held only by Marxists today. In the view of Marxists and some others, it is the foundation for Marx's analysis of the historical tendencies of the capitalist system, including his prediction of its eventual downfall. Given this Marxist interpretation, the labor theory of value could be said to play an integral part in determining how communist leaders view and deal with capitalist countries. It should be admitted, however, that other commentators (see, for example, Robinson 1942) sympathetic to Marx hold that the essentials of his analysis of capitalism can be assembled from his work independently of this theory. There is also some evidence that the labor theory of value affects the internal planning of communist countries, specifically in the pricing and allocation of investment [see COMMUNISM, ECONOMIC ORGANIZATION OF]. The doctrine is obscure, controversial, and has provoked an enormous literature. The word "value" has different meanings for different authors and, not infrequently, in the works of one author. The first section of this article will discuss the modern interpretation of the doctrine and the conditions for its validity. Subsequent sections will treat its
280
VALUE, LABOR THEORY OF
different meanings in the works of Smith, Ricardo, and Marx. The modern interpretation—relative prices. The theory of value, or exchange value, in modern (Western) economics is an explanation of relative prices or exchange ratios. If a hat costs $10 and a shirt $5, the theory of value attempts to explain why one can, in effect, exchange one hat for two shirts, rather than, say, one-half shirt or ten shirts. Following this definition the labor theory of value is interpreted as asserting that commodities "normally" or in the long run tend to exchange in proportion to the labor time used, or "contained," in their production. In the above example the ratio is two for one, according to the theory, because twice as much labor has been used to make the hat as the shirt. Adam Smith first attempted to enunciate the conditions under which this labor theory of relative price would hold. Suppose, to follow his example (1776, book I, chapter 6), we have a nation of hunters consuming only deer and beaver. Suppose further (1) that land is so abundant that it has no price, (2) that there is no known equipment for hunting either animal, and (3) that all hunters are born and remain equally willing and able to hunt both animals. Under these circumstances if it takes twice the labor to kill one beaver as one deer, one beaver will normally exchange for two deer, and the modern interpretation of the labor theory of value (relative price) will hold. For if the rate of exchange were temporarily, say, three to one, while labor costs were two to one, hunters would have an incentive to shift from deer to beaver until the increased supply of beaver and the reduced supply of deer would bring the exchange rate down to two to one. The purpose in such a parable is to throw light upon why this type of labor theory of value does not hold in a private enterprise economy in the actual world. It may be that special skills, natural or acquired, are necessary for beaver but not for deer; that hunters consider hunting beaver arduous or disgraceful; that the land on which beaver are hunted is limited and in private ownership; or finally, that special equipment must first be constructed in order to hunt beaver but not deer. In all these circumstances the demand for beaver relative to the supply of these scarce factors may be such that a premium on beaver or a discount on deer will emerge, compared to the labor times required for their production. The sum of these premiums or discounts will go to the now scarce (and therefore economically "productive") factors in the form
of skilled-labor rates, rents of land, or rates of interest. A special question might be raised as to why the equipment mentioned above should invalidate the labor theory of exchange value, if we count the labor required to produce the equipment as well as the labor of hunting in the total labor requirements. We do count such labor, but a premium still emerges. The production of the equipment requires that the hunter (or his employer) give up the beaver or deer that he could have caught in this period in exchange for future beaver. In an economy with a positive rate of interest, this tying up of "funds" (saving) will not be done unless there is a premium in the price of beaver equivalent to the amount of this interest. This "waiting" is the service provided by capital, and interest is its price, which must be over and above total payments to labor. Smith concluded that in the actual world, as opposed to his nation of hunters, goods exchange in proportion to their total cost of production rather than in proportion to their labor content. Cost of production would be calculated by the going rates of wages, profits, and rents, and by the quantities of labor, capital, and land required to produce any commodity. Cost of production per unit was conceived as not varying when the amount produced of a commodity changed. Thus, a change in demand would merely change the amount produced of a commodity, not its relative price. Ricardo and Marx accepted the essentials of Smith's argument on this question (as did the lesser classical economists and the pre-Marxian socialists). However, all three developed different, and from their viewpoint more important, meanings of value, and to these concepts we now turn. Absolute value in Adam Smith. While Smith defined "exchange value" in the modern sense, he also used the term in the sense of "absolute value." By absolute value we mean a number that may be attached to a commodity independently of any exchange through buying and selling. Smith conceived of an hour's labor as requiring at all times and in all places the same amount of psychological cost in pain, or disutility. In his words, the laborer "must always lay down the same portion of his ease, his liberty or his happiness" ([1776] 1937, p. 33). The (absolute) value of a commodity is defined by the amount of this disutility that it can purchase or command. This is the "labor-command" theory (or better, definition) of value. It is a measure, not a determinant; clearly, at any one time and place the amounts that two commodities can com-
VALUE, LABOR THEORY OF mand will simply be in proportion to their money price, however the latter is determined. Smith's psychology is primitive. He apparently wished to use the labor-command definition of absolute value for welfare judgments. If labor has the same disutility over time and space, we can compare the welfare of the laborer at different times and places by the amount of goods an hour of labor can purchase. This notion is not without interest today. Quite apart from exchange value and absolute value, Smith scattered throughout his writing many comments on labor which have bewildered his followers and scholars and which were significant for the ideological development of socialism in the nineteenth century. He spoke of labor as "the fund which originally supplies it [the nation] with all the necessaries and conveniencies of life" (ibid., p. Ivii); he spoke of profits and rents as deductions from the product of labor (pp. 48-49); and he referred to labor as the "original purchase money" (p. 30) of all things. It is not easy to interpret these statements. It is impossible to imagine that Smith thought of labor as the sole productive agent in a physical or in an economic sense, since he explicitly rejected this view elsewhere. It is possible that he was anxious to counteract what he conceived to be the prevailing idea, that money is the source of national wealth. He wanted to point out that economic life consists essentially in the exchange of services in the form of goods, and since labor is the most important quantitatively, it may be understandable that he took labor services as representative of all services. Thus, we may interpret him as saying that it is labor and not money that is the source of wealth, not that it is labor alone and not labor, capital, and land. It may also be that he thought of labor as the sole agent of production that entails subjective psychological cost; it should be noted that even today we refer loosely to the national product as exhibiting "labor's" productivity. Ricardo. Ricardo accepted Smith's conclusion that exchange values were, in principle, proportional in the long run not to labor requirements but to money costs. However, by a process of abstraction he concluded that changes in long-run exchange values were very close to changes in the labor content of commodities. He eliminated land rent as a relevant money cost by considering only those agricultural commodities produced on soils too poor to yield any rent. He argued that skill premiums between skilled and unskilled labor are constant over long periods and thus would not
281
cause changes in relative values. He was left with changes in the rate of interest on capital as a cause of divergence between (changes in) exchange ratios and (changes in) labor content. Ricardo was insistent that such divergences occur; he was equally insistent that they were quantitatively unimportant. And he was prepared to use labor content in applied problems as an approximate determinant (or "regulator") of exchange values. Ricardo also had a labor theory of absolute value. It was not until late in his life that he distinguished sharply between absolute and relative value, but both concepts were implicit in his earliest work on value. For Ricardo the absolute value of a commodity was the quantity of labor it contained, not what it could command. Given, therefore, his belief that exchange ratios are close to labor ratios, the ratio of two absolute values would be close to, although not equal to, exchange ratios. There is some evidence that Ricardo thought of capital, i.e.. "waiting," as well as labor, as a determinant of absolute value. Yet the preponderant evidence points to labor alone. In the only place that Ricardo defined absolute value, he mentioned only labor ([1815-1823] 1951, p. 397). More important, absolute value has meaning only in terms of one homogeneous unit. Ricardo's purpose was to find an expression for the total output of all goods and services. To describe this as x units of labor and y units of capital (waiting) is not satisfactory unless we have a link between x and y. Similarly there is no meaning in the summation of the ratio 2 deer = 1 beaver over all deer and beaver. But there is meaning (even if modern economists would question its usefulness) in the sum of the labor hours in all goods, and Ricardo considered the aim of political economy to be the determination of how such an aggregate is allocated among total rents, profits, and wages, similarly measured. Thus Ricardo was not so much interested in relative prices for their own sake. (The modern notion of real national product—the money value of all goods and services deflated by a price index—was not available to him.) Marx. Scientifically, if not ideologically, Marx's purposes were very similar to those of Ricardo, whom he considered his intellectual mentor. Marx, in effect, defined "exchange value" as absolute and as equal to labor content. (Relative value, or exchange value in the modern sense, was the quite distinct "prices of production.") He attempted a proof of this definition along the following lines: If two shirts have a value equal to one hat, we may write 2 shirts = 1 hat. What is implied by the symbol
282
VALUE, LABOR THEORY OF
" = "? It tells us that in two things there is some common quantitative entity. Marx eliminated the possibility that this common thing may be a physical property of shirts and hats, not on observed empirical grounds, but with the argument that the physical properties have to do with the usefulness of commodities whereas usefulness and exchange value are uncorrelated. He concluded that the common entities must be the amounts of labor contained in the commodities. (See 1867-1879, vol. 1, chapter 1.) The argument could be disputed on several grounds. Most fundamentally it is a play on the symbol " = ." It is an illegitimate if ancient procedure to use an undefined word and then to establish a point of fact by using a particular definition of the word. The use of " = " does not, in general, require homogeneous units. Apart from this, there are other characteristics that the equality could express. A later school would have suggested marginal utility; but in ordinary conversation it would seem that it simply means the quantity of money which must be paid for the respective quantities. If we choose to ignore this proof we may regard Marx as defining value, like Ricardo, as the labor contained in a commodity and aggregating, like him, this quantity over all commodities. Again like Ricardo, he was interested in the distribution of this aggregate. Subtracting from the aggregate the quantity of commodities (measured in labor) that make up wages, we have "surplus value." Labor is by definition "exploited" whenever it receives less than the total product which it, by virtue of the method of measurement, has "produced." In another dubious equality, Marx equated the sum of labor-defined values with the aggregate of money values of commodities (ibid., vol. 3, part 2). The relationship between such values in labor and prices in money is termed the "transformation problem." None of the three great exponents of the labor theory of value held the labor theory of relative prices or exchange value in the modern sense. Ricardo was willing to use it as an approximation. The labor theory of value therefore means a theory of absolute value. For Smith this was defined by labor command as a method of making welfare comparisons. For Ricardo and Marx, the definition of absolute value as labor time was a method of aggregating total output as a preliminary to investigating its distribution. Much confusion has been caused by the failure of modern and neoclassical economists to perceive
the distinction between exchange ratios and absolute values and to appreciate the purposes of Ricardo and Marx in using the latter. On the other hand, while Marxist writers have been more conscious of the distinction, they have generally supposed that relative values are in some sense the "phenomenal" form which can be derived from an underlying "substance" or "foundation" in absolute value. In fact they are radically different and incomparable. DONALD F. GORDON [See also ECONOMIC THOUGHT, article on SOCIALIST THOUGHT; UTILITY; and the biographies of MARX; RICARDO; SMITH, ADAM.] BIBLIOGRAPHY BLADEN, V. W. 1938 Adam Smith on Value. Pages 2743 in Essays in Political Economy in Honour of E. J. Urwick. Edited by H. A. Innis. Univ. of Toronto Press. BLAUG, MARK 1962 Economic Theory in Retrospect. Homewood, 111.: Irwin. -»• Contains valuable bibliographical appendices. CASSELS, JOHN M. 1935 A Re-interpretation of Ricardo on Value. Quarterly Journal of Economics 49:518-532. DOBB, MAURICE (1937) 1940 Political Economy and Capitalism: Some Essays in Economic Tradition. Rev. ed. New York: International Publishers. GORDON, DONALD F. 1959 What Was the Labor Theory of Value? American Economic Review 49:462-472. MARX, KARL (1867-1879) 1925-1926 Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. 3 vols. Chicago: Kerr. -> Volume 1: The Process of Capitalist Production. Volume 2: The Process of Circulation of Capital. Volume 3: The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole. Volume 1 was published in 1867. The manuscripts of volumes 2 and 3 were written between 1867 and 1879 and first published posthumously in German in 1885 and 1894. MEEK, RONALD L. 1956 Studies in the Labour Theory of Value. London: Lawrence & Wishart. ->• A thorough commentary from the Marxist point of view. RICARDO, DAVID (1815-1823) 1951 Works and Correspondence. Edited by Piero Sraffa. Volume 4: Pamphlets and Papers, 1815-1823. Cambridge Univ. Press. ROBERTSON, HECTOR M.; and TAYLOR, W. L. 1957 Adam Smith's Approach to the Theory of Value. Economic Journal 67=181-198. ROBINSON, JOAN (1942) 1947 An Essay on Marxian Economics. London: Macmillan. ROBINSON, JOAN 1951 The Labour Theory of Value. Volume 1, pages 146-151 in Joan Robinson, Collected Economic Papers. Oxford: Blackwell; New York: Kelley. SMITH, ADAM (1776) 1937 An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. New York: Modern Library. -» A two-volume paperback edition was published in 1963 by Irwin. SRAFFA, PIERO 1951 Introduction. In Volume 1 of David Ricardo, Works and Correspondence. Cambridge Univ. Press. STIGLER, GEORGE J. 1952 The Ricardian Theory of Value and Distribution. Journal of Political Economy 60:187-207.
VALUES: The Concept of Values STIGLER, GEORGE J. 1958 Ricardo and the 93% Labor Theory of Value. American Economic Review 48:357-367. SWEEZY, PAUL M. 1942 The Theory of Capitalist Development: Principles of Marxian Political Economy. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
VALUES i. THE CONCEPT OF VALUES n. VALUE SYSTEMS
Robin M. Williams, Jr. Ethel M. Albert
THE CONCEPT OF VALUES
The term "values" may refer to interests, pleasures, likes, preferences, duties, moral obligations, desires, wants, needs, aversions and attractions, and many other modalities of selective orientation (Pepper 1958, p. 7). Values, in other words, are found in the large and diverse universe of selective behavior. Presumably sheer reflex behavior does not manifest values or valuing: neither an involuntary eyeblink or knee jerk nor any one of numerous biochemical processes in the human body constitutes value behavior. However, it is very doubtful that any one descriptive definition can do complete justice to the full range and diversity of recognizable value phenomena. The limits of value may be conceived very broadly or quite narrowly, but the limits should never be arbitrarily set, and their location ought to be justified in any particular case. A broad, comprehensive conception of value has the advantage of calling attention to possible value elements in all behavior save the most rigidly instinctive or automatic. A narrow definition may have the virtues of specificity and definiteness but may lead to errors if the excluded phenomena are not taken into account through concepts closely related to the idea of "value." One of the more widely accepted definitions in the social science literature considers values to be conceptions of the desirable, influencing selective behavior. In this restrictive definition, a distinction is made between what is desired and what is desirable, the latter being equated with what we ought to desire; values regulate "impulse satisfaction in accord with the whole array of hierarchical enduring goals of the personality, the requirements of both personality and sociocultural system for order, the need for respecting the interests of others and of the group as a whole in social living" (Kluckhohn 1951, p. 399). This is a highly socialized view of values, which rules out, for instance, purely hedonic values.
283
In the broader view, anything good or bad is a value (Pepper 1958, p. 7), or a value is anything of interest to a human subject (Perry 1954). Men are not indifferent to the world; they do not stop with a sheerly factual view of their experience (Kohler 1938). Explicitly or implicitly they are continually regarding things as good or bad, as true or false, as virtues or vices. A comprehensive view of the total field of valuing seems most useful to begin with; more specific conceptions can then be developed for particular purposes. Accordingly, we look first to the common features of all value phenomena. It seems that all values contain some cognitive elements (although some definitions do not include this), that they have a selective or directional quality, and that they involve some affective component. Values serve as criteria for selection in action. When most explicit and fully conceptualized, values become criteria for judgment, preference, and choice. When implicit and unreflective, values nevertheless perform as if they constituted grounds for decisions in behavior. Men do prefer some things to others; they do select one course of action rather than another out of a range of possibilities; they do judge the conduct of other men. Evidently purposive actions fall within the boundaries of evaluative action. Within purposive actions we can identify three main kinds of value: conative (desire, liking), achievement (success versus frustration), and affective (pleasure versus pain or unpleasantness). Within any purposive act, these values may be strung out or distributed along the total history of the act (Pepper 1958, pp. 304-305). In ordinary speech the term "value" is used interchangeably in two senses that must be kept separate here. In one meaning, we refer to the specific evaluation of any object, as in "industrialized countries place a high value on formal education" or "governmental regulation is worthless." Here we are told how an object is rated or otherwise appraised, but not what standards are used to make the judgments. The second meaning of value refers to the criteria, or standards in terms of which evaluations are made, as in "education is good because it increases economic efficiency." Value-ascriterion is usually the more important usage for purposes of social scientific analysis (Williams [1951] 1960, p. 401). The definition of value we use for purposes of anchoring and clarifying the discussion of values is a descriptive definition, which is continually being confronted by the tests of adequacy imposed
284
VALUES: The Concept of Values
by actual behavior. Thus the description must be empirically verified or it must be changed: "the value facts themselves are the ultimate evaluative criteria" (Pepper 1958, p. 300). The value facts are implicit in evaluative acts; therefore, explicit definitions of value are always potentially open to reformulation in the face of new evaluative acts. That which is implicit in evaluative acts is a "selective system" or "natural norm." Related concepts. Value as an explicit concept was in early use in various narrow technical meanings in the field of economics. Only in the last three decades or so have value concepts found widespread use among the other social sciences, although a pioneering effort was made by Thomas and Znaniecki prior to the 1920s in The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918). Psychologists have employed an array of related terms: attitudes, needs, sentiments, dispositions, interests, preferences, motives, cathexes, valences (Smith 1963, pp. 326-331). Anthropologists have spoken of obligation (Brandt 1961), ethos, culture pattern, themes, and life style. Sociologists and political scientists have referred to interests, ethics, ideologies, mores, norms, attitudes, aspirations, obligations, rights, and sanctions. Clearly there is no point in extending the meaning of the term so broadly that there is no way of distinguishing between values and other determinants of behavior. Human social behavior is the outcome of physiological states and capacities of the organism, of the stimulus field to which it reacts, of the conceptual schemes within which it interprets its environment, and of "motives" or "needs" which are not identical with the value elements which enter into them. Values constitute only one among several classes of factors that should be taken into account if one seeks to predict and understand human behavior. Although it is often difficult in specific instances to distinguish between values and such related concepts as beliefs, needs, or motives, reasonably clear distinctions can be drawn in general terms. When, for example, we think of values as components of personality, it is clear that values are not the same as needs or desires. Needs derive from deficiency or disruption. Desires are wishes or appetitions directed toward certain objects or states. Desires may become so intense as to become needs, and needs are typically intermingled with corresponding desires. In any case, however, it is possible for there to be a need or a desire (for example, for food) in which values are not the only, or even the most important, component. On the other hand, values themselves may be a source of needs
and desires, as when one seeks to remove the pangs of not fulfilling "one's duty" or positively aspires to live up to high standards of craftsmanship. Values are not motives. Many particular motives may reinforce commitment to a given value: "A given value may have a strength that is relatively independent of any particular motive, though it remains in some sense a function of the total motivational system" (Kluckhohn 1951, p. 425). Values are not the same as norms for conduct. Norms are rules for behaving: they say more or less specifically what should or should not be done by particular types of actors in given circumstances. Values are standards of desirability that are more nearly independent of specific situations. The same value may be a point of reference for a great many specific norms; a particular norm may represent the simultaneous application of several separable values. Thus the value premise "equality" may enter into norms for relationships between husband and wife, brother and brother, teacher and student, and so on; on the other hand, the norm "a teacher must not show favoritism in grading" may in a particular instance involve the values of equality, honesty, humanitarianism, and several others. Values, as standards (criteria) for establishing what should be regarded as desirable, provide the grounds for accepting or rejecting particular norms. Thus achievement values, stressing active instrumental accomplishment against a standard of excellence, may be reflected in norms for sports, games, occupational activities, community service, political life, education, science, and so on. The same principle holds for values considered as desirable objects or states; for example, a high positive evaluation of "freedom" or "authority" may be one of the grounds for a great many specific norms in various areas of society, culture, and personality. On the other hand, many norms are multivalued, relating simultaneously, for example, to hedonic criteria, considerations of efficiency, and values of social integration. A minor but clear case in point might be norms of etiquette for social dining. As one moves along a scale of increasing generality, in which norms become more and more detached from particular circumstances, a point eventually will be reached at which "norm" becomes practically indistinguishable from value. Marginal cases naturally are debatable and difficult to classify, but a knowledge of the context usually permits a reasonably satisfactory assignment of the concrete specifications of conduct to the class of "norms" and the standards of desirability to the category of "values." The injunction "Be honest"
VALUES: The Concept of Values has the appearance of a norm, but unless we know what behavior qualifies as honest in various circumstances we have no real guide to particular conduct; we know only that something called "honesty" is regarded as a desirable thing. Careful study of a large sample of norms dealing with honesty typically is required to disentangle the generalized value principle from the admixture of other values and other determinants of behavior. Empirical study of values. Description and analysis of values by social scientists rest on the use of several lines of evidence. Preliminary clues may be obtained from testimony: individuals are able, to some extent, to tell what values they hold. Although such testimony is not fully accurate or complete, it should not be ignored. Further evidence may come from systematic study of choices of objects and actions, either in "natural" behavior or in various kinds of tests, interviews, and experiments. Research may chart indications of directions of interest as shown by cultural products as well as by behavior directly observed. Content analysis of verbal materials is often a suitable technique in this connection; identification of implicit assumptions in social discourse often reveals values not otherwise readily discovered. Another particularly valuable source of evidence concerning values is found in observations of rewards and punishments. By observing which behaviors are praised and otherwise rewarded and which are criticized, condemned, or punished, we gain important data for identifying the socially effective standards that are actually operating in any group or society. A full description of the values present in any situation comes only from the cumulative data from all of the sources listed above. As I have said elsewhere: Starting with the initial location of value in a relation of a person to an object of interest, the sources of evidence mentioned above indicate just so many "operational definitions" of value: value as overt choice or preference, as attention or emphasis, as statement or assertion, as implicit premise, as a referent of social sanctions. These various evidences are "pointers" that say "this is what is meant." Not all are of equal usefulness for every purpose, but all are useful. When used in combination, these several different approximations gain reliability in so far as they are mutually consistent. (Williams [1951] 1960, pp. 408-409) A sound general principle in observing social behavior is to follow the dynamic course of sanctions wherever this may lead. Extremely close analysis of every detail of rewarding or punishing social consequences of a particular line of action typically will reveal important value data.
285
For values that are concealed by conformity to social conventions and taboos, as well as for those camouflaged by defenses arising from repressions, recourse must be had to indirect approaches through projective testing, ingenious experimental designs and techniques, and intensive clinical interviewing and observation. In this connection it should be noted that much of psychotherapy involves the identification and strengthening of some value commitments and the weakening or redefinition of others. Although values are not identical with ideologies, it is feasible to extract useful data on values from content analysis of ideological materials. Undoubtedly the empirical study of values by objective methods is in its infancy. Results already achieved, however, are grounds for expecting very important, and now unsuspected, findings in the future. Values in social science. In its efforts to attain higher levels of objectivity and scientific rigor, a considerable part of Western sociology for a generation or so after 1900 tended to avoid explicit dealings with values. Values were often regarded as somehow "subjective" and were not included among the "hard facts" that were thought to be proper objects of study. Beginning perhaps with The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918), the concept of values found increasing use, although the full influence of this study was not felt until the 1930s. By 1949, it could be said that a movement was under way "to come out in the open with an explicit presentation of values and full analysis of their moral presuppositions, deductions and consequences" (Mukerjee 1949, p. vii). Economics. In the nature of the case, of course, economics has worked continuously with one or another variant of the concept of value—for example, value-in-exchange or preference order. The long struggle to develop measures of utility has largely been renounced in modern times in favor of direct indices of preference or choice and substitutability, as in "indifference curve" analysis. Thus for certain kinds of economic analysis, "value" is "the relative position of a good in a preference ordering, and the higher its position the greater is its value" (Kuhn 1963, p. 266). Anthropology. Much work in modern anthropology has made use of the concept of "value" or of closely related ideas. Aside from the explicit value analyses of Clyde Kluckhohn (1951), Caudill and Scarr (1962), and Florence Kluckhohn and Fred Strodtbeck (1961), there are the influential notions of dominant cultural patterns (Ruth Benedict), cultural focus (Alfred L. Kroeber), and the
286
VALUES: The Concept of Values
conception of cultural themes developed by Morris E. Opler (1948; 1959). Psychology. As M. Brewster Smith (1963) has shown, the presuppositions of twentieth-century academic psychology have militated against effective use of value concepts in research and theory. Experimental psychology, in spite of a willingness to accept many hypothetical intervening variables, long resisted the use of value theory. But the pressure of repeated empirical observations could not be denied beyond a certain point (Asch 1952, pp. 353-384), and modern learning theories appear increasingly to recognize the phenomenon of massive learning of generalizations under affectively charged conditions. Political science. Political science in its traditional forms has been in considerable part a normative discipline, often attempting to state desirable specifications for political life. Newer emphases on the scientific study of political behavior tend to force a more explicit recognition of hidden value assumptions and to direct attention at the same time to values as relevant facts to be explained or used in their turn as explanatory factors in political analyses. Insofar as history elects to strive for objectively tested generalizations rather than only literary narrative or humanistic interpretations, it likewise confronts the dual needs of controlling the influence of values upon the historian's conclusions and of analyzing values as variables in historical events and sequences. Thus, problems of values appear in all fields of the social sciences, and value elements are potentially important as variables to be analyzed in all major areas of investigation. Value classification and value analysis. Values may be usefully classified in a large number of different ways; each mode of classification points to potentially important properties, modalities, or dimensions. Any value analysis must at least take into account the existence of values answering to appetites and aversions, including both affective values, having to do with pleasure or gratification and the avoidance of displeasure, and conativeachievement values, having to do with the attainment of desired states. In addition, such an analysis must be aware of prudential values, character (personality integration) values, social values, cultural values, and biological survival values (Pepper 1958). In short, values enter into each of the four great systems of human action: organism, personality, society, and culture. Both philosophical analysis and social science often fall into serious error by paying attention to a single kind of value while ignoring or underestimating others.
Values as empirical elements in human behavior certainly arise out of human experience and hence may be affected by any conditions, including social conditions, that affect experience. Values may therefore be analyzed as dependent variables, subject to changes that are consequent to changes in population, technology, economic production, political organization, and so on. Once established, however, values also operate as independent variables, channeling reactions to prior innovations and serving as a basis for further innovations. Sociological thought generally attributes strategic importance to moral values in processes of institutionalization and social control. Indeed, one important modern social theory holds that "Moral standards constitute, as the focus of the evaluative aspect of the common culture, the core of the stabilizing mechanisms of the system of social interaction" (Parsons 1964, p. 22). A crucial problem for further study arises in just this connection. All conflict of values that occurs within a single organism-personality is resolvable, in principle, within a single locus of integration. But there is an enormous (and perhaps unbridgeable) gap between the individual and the social levels (Arrow 1951). In a very crude way we already know that as the sociocultural systems are pressed more severely for survival, they impose increasingly stringent restrictions on "personal" values. The extent to which individual value realization is compatible with social, cultural, and biological survival values requires much additional analysis. Values do not emerge in experience as sharply separated, unitary standards, each self-contained in its monadic independence from other coexisting values. Instead, the actual content and boundaries of any particular value will be affected by its changing relations to other values. In one group or society men may conceive of "freedom" only within the limits set by commitment to a principle of submission to a hierarchical order of authority; in another society, freedom, is closely tied to equalitarian values. The two societies will not experience the same "freedom." Oppositions and conflicts of value are present in all societies. Under conditions of rapid social change, special strains are placed upon value integration. When serious conflicts arise over basic values, it is doubtful that either suppression or compromise is effective in producing new integration as is the expansion of interests to rearrange and recenter value priorities (Allport 1959, p. 146). It is the rare and limiting case if and when a person's behavior is guided over a considerable period of time by one and only one value. Such a
VALUES: Value Systems value would represent an "absolute preference" (Wright 1963a). More often, particular acts or sequences of acts are steered by multiple and changing clusters of values. Furthermore, oppositions and contradictions among values are not unusual, and both individuals and collectivities must, inescapably, face choices among values from time to time. At the very least, even the most harmonious systems of values require selectivity in the balancing of different claims to time, energy, and other resources. Not all desiderata can be equally met at any one time. ROBIN M. WILLIAMS, JR. [Directly related are the entries ATTITUDES; CREATIVITY, article on SOCIAL ASPECTS; DUTY; ETHICS, article On ETHICAL SYSTEMS AND SOCIAL STRUCTURES; MORAL DEVELOPMENT; MOTIVATION; NORMS; SANCTIONS; SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY; SYSTEMS ANALYSIS, article on SOCIAL SYSTEMS. Other relevant material may be found in AESTHETICS; IDEOLOGY; INTEGRATION; LAW, article on THE LEGAL SYSTEM; NATIONAL CHARACTER; SOCIAL
STRUCTURE; UTILITARIANISM;
UTILITY; and in the biographies of BECKER; KLUCKHOHN; KOHLER; SOROKIN; THOMAS; ZNANIECKI.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
Values may be classified in a large number of ways. Of the books listed below, the following contain classifications of particular interest to social scientists: Kluckhohn 1951; Williams 1951, chapters 3 and 11; Pepper 1958; Wright 1963b; White 1951. For a useful bibliography, see Albert & Kluckhohn 1959. ALBERT, ETHEL M.; and KLUCKHOHN, CLYDE 1959 A Selected Bibliography on Values, Ethics, and Esthetics in the Behavioral Sciences and Philosophy, 1920-1958. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. ALLPORT, GORDON W. 1959 Normative Compatibility in the Light of Social Science. Pages 137-150 in Abraham H. Maslow (editor), New Knowledge in Human Values. New York: Harper. ALLPORT, GORDON W.; VERNON, PHILIP E.; and LINDZEY, GARDNER (1931) 1960 A Study of Values. 3d ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. -> Allport and Vernon were the authors of the 1931 edition. ARROW, KENNETH J. 1951 Social Choice and Individual Values. New York: Wiley. ASCH, SOLOMON E. (1952) 1959 Social Psychology. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. BRANDT, RICHARD B. 1961 Value and Obligation: Systematic Readings in Ethics. New York: Harcourt. CAUDILL, WILLIAM; and SCARR, HARRY A. 1962 Japanese Value Orientations and Culture Change. Ethnology 1:53-91. Du WORS, RICHARD E. 1952 Persistence and Change in Local Values of Two New England Communities. Rural Sociology 17:207-217. KLUCKHOHN, CLYDE 1951 Values and Value-orientations in the Theory of Action: An Exploration in Definition and Classification. Pages 388-433 in Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils (editors), Toward a General Theory of Action. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. KLUCKHOHN, FLORENCE R.; and STRODTBECK, FRED L. 1961 Variations in Value Orientations. Evanston, 111.: Row, Peterson.
287
KOHLER, WOLFGANG 1938 The Place of Value in a World of Facts. New York: Liveright. KUHN, ALFRED 1963 The Study of Society: A Unified Approach. Homewood, 111.: Irwin. McDoucALL, WILLIAM (1908) 1950 An Introduction to Social Psychology. 30th ed. London: Methuen. -» A paperback edition was published in 1960 by Barnes and Noble. MORRIS, CHARLES W. 1956 Varieties of Human Value. Univ. of Chicago Press. MUKERJEE, RADHAKAMAL 1949 The Social Structure of Values. London: Macmillan. OPLER, MORRIS E. 1948 Some Recently Developed Concepts Relating to Culture. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 4:107-122. OPLER, MORRIS E. 1959 Component, Assemblage, and Theme in Cultural Integration and Differentiation. American Anthropologist New Series 61:955-964. PARSONS, TALCOTT 1964 Social Structure and Personality. New York: Free Press. -» A collection of previously published essays. PEPPER, STEPHEN C. 1958 The Sources of Value. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press. PERRY, RALPH B. 1954 Realms of Value: A Critique of Human Civilization. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. SMITH, M. BREWSTER 1963 Personal Values in the Study of Lives. Pages 324-347 in Robert W. White (editor), The Study of Lives: Essays on Personality in Honor of Henry A. Murray. New York: Atherton. THOMAS, WILLIAM I.; and ZNANIECKI, FLORIAN (1918) 1958 The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. Vol. 1. 2d ed. New York: Dover. WHITE, RALPH K. 1951 Value Analysis: The Nature and Use of the Method. Glen Gardner, N.J.: Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. WILLIAMS, ROBIN M. JR. (1951) 1960 American Society: A Sociological Interpretation. 2d ed., rev. New York: Knopf. WRIGHT, GEORG H. VON 1963a The Logic of Preference: An Essay. Edinburgh Univ. Press. WRIGHT, GEORG H. VON 1963b The Varieties of Goodness. London: Routledge; New York: Humanities. II VALUE SYSTEMS
In the study of cultural value systems, diverse conceptions of values may be converted from competing alternatives into indices of the kinds of values that should be included in a comprehensive model for descriptive and comparative study. The assumption that different kinds and levels of values —specific and general rules, goals, norms, and other criteria that govern conduct, evaluation, and sanctions—compose a cultural value system is complex. In addition to categories for naming and classifying values, the theory of value systems requires a means of specifying the relations among them. Values may be embedded in verbal, actional, and situational contexts. Each involves different types of relation and structure, logical, or behavioral, or social. Hence, values may appear as variables in systems of personality or society as well as in culture.
288
VALUES: Value Systems
The hypothesis that each culture has a distinctive value system can be explored through examination of relevant observation data, concepts, and methods. The basic data from which a cultural value system can be constructed are abundant in verbal and nonverbal behavior. The data include explicit value judgments and such indices of values as verbal and actional reward and punishment, blame and praise, approval and disapproval, appreciation and rejection, encouragement and suppression. The differential expenditure of resources— time, energy, and the natural environment, for example—provides another clue to values. Behavior in situations of conflict and choice is relevant. Both positive and negative values belong in a value system. Thus, the value system organizes explicit and implicit values—those given directly in value judgments and those that can be inferred from valuerelevant verbal and nonverbal behaviors. As raw data of observation, evaluative behavior may appear random. Analysis discloses patterning in the evaluations of members of any sociocultural community. There is consistency in responses to recurrent situations among individuals who speak the same language, inhabit the same geographic area, and interact in the same social system. Intracultural variation occurs in even the simplest society. Part of the pattern is the systematic variation in values according to sex, age, personality, and social role. Hence, a cultural value system does not describe the values of any individual. It is a summative construct in which the diverse value sets of individuals and groups are related as complementary elements of a single system. Values are by definition distinct from conduct. The stipulation of positive and negative sanctions presupposes the possibility of departures from norms and failures to achieve goals. A value system, then, represents what is expected or hoped for, required or forbidden. It is not a report of actual conduct but is the system of criteria by which conduct is judged and sanctions applied. In sum, operationally, a cultural value system is the inductively based, logically ordered set of criteria of evaluations, constructed from explicit value judgments and inferences from inexplicit, valuerelated behaviors. Theoretically, it is the patterned or structured criteria, explicit and implicit, by reference to which evaluative behavior becomes intelligible. Functionally, it is the set of principles whereby conduct is directed and regulated and a guide for individuals and the social group. Problems of definition, method, and theory. Still in an exploratory stage, the study of cultural value systems is part of a general trend toward the view that subjective and humanistic subject mat-
ter is a suitable object of rigorous inquiry. The transition from the traditional preoccupations of value theory entails redirecting definitions, methods, and theory toward observational data and operations and away from purely verbal formulations. The question whether values are "real" and have "causal influence" is being recast as specific, verifiable hypotheses in which values figure as an independent variable. The question whether values are "emotive" or "cognitive" is being translated into studies of the nature and functions of evaluation and its relation to cognition. Constructing value systems from existing materials remains problematic. The literature on values includes several thousand studies, of varying length, of ethics, law, religion, politics, art, social values, child rearing, and more. The values of many different societies, social groups, and personalities have been described. Interdisciplinary research combines data, concepts, and methods from many social-behavioral sciences, and relevant research is done on such topics as attitudes, motivations, sentiments, socialization, social control, and ideology. Utilization of the abundant, diversified research resources is hampered by side effects familiar in other social-behavioral specializations. Descriptive studies do not employ parallel categories; theories tend to be overextended or monocausal and to overlap or conflict; methods, models, and hypotheses are often of narrow scope and in need of refinement. Within and among the social-behavioral sciences, moreover, the benefits of a plurality of viewpoints and procedures are often neutralized by the difficulties of communication. For the foreseeable future, it is doubtful whether a definition of values can be produced that embraces all the meanings assigned the term and its cognates or that would be acceptable to all investigators. The diverse lines of approach are not likely to converge with ease in a unified theory and methodology. Recognition of the fluid state of value studies may be used as a safeguard against the dangers inherent in the ambiguity of the term "value" and in a premature commitment to a method or theory. The selection of research objectives and of the definitions, methods, and theory appropriate to their realization continues on a trial-and-error basis. With these strictures in mind, we may examine several alternative modes of describing cultural value systems. Descriptive-comparative models Assembling diverse value-relevant data in a single system effects a great simplification. Evaluative discourse and conduct relative to goals, ideals,
VALUES: Value Systems ethics, aesthetics, kinship, politics, religion, law, socialization, social control, etc. can be logically and economically ordered by drawing out the underlying general criteria. Formal and functional similarities in value judgments, evaluations, and sanctions, as well as systematic interdependences among them, tend to be obscured by the apparent heterogeneity of special categories of values. Thus, in a number of societies as remote from each other as imperial China and the central African kingdom of Burundi, the model of filial piety, associated with a rigidly hierarchal ordering of all social relations, draws together in a single formula masses of verbal and behavioral data. In parent-child relations, husband—wife relations, politics, religion, and economics, the same superordinate-subordinate pattern applies. "Cattle" as a prized object among the herding peoples of Africa draws into a unified value cluster such seemingly diverse elements as economic, political, and military patronage; patrilineal inheritance rules; ideas about the nutritive value of milk, blood, and beef; the aesthetic appreciation of minutely detailed bovine charms; and bridewealth in marriage. An additional methodological gain from following specific cultural lines to generalized values is diminution of culture-bound distortion from Western conceptions of values in the study of non-Western cultures. Impetus and direction for the study of cultural values have come from the work of Alfred L. Kroeber, Clyde Kluckhohn, Talcott Parsons, Charles W. Morris, Robert Redfield, Ralph Lin ton, Raymond Firth, A. I. Hallowell, and many others in anthropology and allied fields. Models and techniques have been pressed into service from linguistics, logic, philosophy, and other fields. Adequate description of cultural value systems is closely bound up with comparative, cross-cultural study. Comparison, methodologically significant in its own right, is virtually indispensable for constructing descriptive models that transcend the cultural boundaries of individual investigators. Several models for the description of cultural value systems have been devised in the course of comparative, cross-cultural study. Clyde Kluckhohn, in 1949, initiated a comprehensive, long-term project for the comparative study of values. Guided by his writing and thinking, the project utilized field-work research and the extensive resources of value theories in the social sciences and philosophy. [See KROEBER; REDFIELD; WORLD VIEW.] Diversity and comparability From the above project emerged the theory of value orientations of Florence Kluckhohn (Kluckhohn & Strodtbeck 1961, chapter 1). Intracultural
289
and cross-cultural variations were comprehended in the schema used for comparative statistical analysis of five cultures in New Mexico. Differential preferences, within different societies, are assumed, with respect to variations of a set of basic value orientations: (1) conceptions of the character of innate human nature: evil, neutral or mixed, good; and mutable or immutable; (2) the relation of man to nature and supernature: subjugation, harmony, mastery; (3) temporal focus of human life: past, present, future; (4) modality of human activity: being, being-in-becoming, doing; and (5) the modality of man's relationship to other men: lineality, collaterally, individualism. Internal and cross-cultural variation is exemplified by the rank-ordering of the "time orientations" of the five cultures: for the Spanish-Americans, present, future, past; for the two Anglo-American groups (Texans, Mormons), future, present, past; for the Zuni and the Navajo Indians, present, past, future. The valueorientation schema has been used in studies of Japanese and other cultures. In the same comparative study and drawing extensively on the research and theory of Clyde Kluckhohn and others, a model for description and comparison was devised by the author, with a view to maximum comprehensiveness and detail (Albert 1956, pp. 221-226). The principle of organization is logico-semantic. Positive and negative values are classified and related according to their level of generalization and function in discourse and conduct. At the lowest level of generality, "valued entities" are the numerous specific events, states of feeling, and other objects of explicit everyday evaluation. Categories of specific value qualities may be directly derived by classifying such evaluations. They also identify the basic vocabulary of values and its range of reference. At the next higher level of generality are normative value qualities. These are derived from culturally defined character qualities—virtues and vices, ideal models for kinship, political and other roles—and from directives for conduct, usually accompanied by stipulations of positive and negative sanctions. Specific normative value qualities, fitted into a pyramid of ascending generalization, are instrumental to central or focal cultural values. These are usually few in number: they constitute a mutually interdependent set that defines the "good life." Positive focal values are usually rewards for respecting normative values, and negative focal values are usually punishments for failure to do so. Finally, at the highest level of abstraction and generality are the "first principles" or logical foundation of the value system. These include the unquestioned, selfjustifying premises of the value system; definitions
290
VALUES: Value Systems
of basic, general value terms, for example, happiness, virtue, beauty; and value orientations that define man as a moral agent and judge of values. Conceived as a skeletal structure, the logicosemantic model for a value system is a relatively neutral frame of reference for describing and comparing the specific contents and the relational and structural dynamics of diverse cultural value systems. Several examples will suggest the range and content of cross-cultural diversity. For the Navajo Indians, the value system is oriented to this-worldly happiness. Its language is specific, empirical, situationally relative, and pragmatic. Consequences are the principal point of reference for value judgments. Preservation or restoration of harmonious order in the universe is the central focus, and correction, compensation, and neutralization of evils dominate the operation of the value system. For the Zuni Indians, the overall goals of the value system are ethnocentric stability and well-being. Control, orderliness, and integration are the principal means to realizing values. Ceremonialism, formalism, materialism and hedonism, confidence, and conservatism support the operation of the value system. Value judgments are directed primarily to actions and consequences. For the Spanish-Americans, religion, custom, and fatalism are combined in a value system conceived in intensely personalistic, aesthetic-emotive terms. Rigid hierarchy differentiates the applications of value judgments. Duty, authority, and fixed, abstract, ideal values are accepted bases of evaluation. For the Anglo-American Texan community, secularized, individualistic idealism and practicality are primary in the value system. High ideals are recognized as an incentive and guide for the good life, but are assumed to be unattainable. Alternative levels of evaluation and compartmentalization of value categories characterize value judgments that are closely related to the concrete conditions of existence [see KLUCKHOHN]. The complexity of value systems Even in a more extended sample, similarities and differences in the contents of cultural value systems would appear but each cultural combination would be unique. For this, as for other descriptive-comparative generalizations, however, refinement of concepts and methods and additional research are needed. Increasing the geographic range of systematic descriptions of value systems would broaden the base of comparative inquiry. Comparative techniques have advanced only a little beyond simple, parallel descriptions, toward consideration of functional equivalences and hypotheses relating values to other phenomena. Improvements in de-
scriptive models are needed to relate the values of individuals and subcultural groups to the larger cultural system and to serve for the study of societies of such different orders of complexity as the small tribe, the small nation, and the heterogeneous, heavily populated large state. For the collection of data, increasingly refined instruments are being sought to supplement conventional field-work study, interviews, and questionnaires. The inverse ratio of precision of techniques to comprehensiveness of results is an unsolved problem not only in data gathering but also in analysis and interpretation. Experience with comparative study suggests some guidelines for collecting culturally valid values data. Identification of the value vocabulary of a people is an obvious first step in the process of constructing their value system. Any anthropologist is prepared for nonequivalence between the set of value terms in his own language and in that of the culture being studied. The appropriate techniques transcend routine translation problems. Few languages have a general term equivalent to "value." Not a few languages combine ethical and aesthetic value in a single word. An extreme case, the single Navajo word hozoni refers to what in English are differentiated as aesthetic, practical, spiritual, hedonic, and ethical values. Combining such features in a single word makes a denotative difference. It also eliminates familiar connotations, for example, of the incompatibility in most Western thinking of "spiritual" and "hedonic" or "aesthetic" and "practical." Unfamiliar connotative associations to seemingly familiar words can effectively block comprehension of a value system. In Mediterranean fatalism, the ethical and aesthetic are conjoined, not conflictual; resignation is heroic acceptance of adversity and of humility in prosperity, not passive submission; paradox and contradiction reveal the nature of the universe, not carelessness of logic. Contextual analysis is a necessary corrective in comparisons. Health, security, wealth, enjoyment, faith in the supernatural, knowledge, and other values that figure prominently in the value systems of many cultures are similar in name only. In different cultures, knowledge refers to such diverse contents as revealed religious doctrine, traditional formulas, and modern science. Context is needed also to locate value judgments that do not contain explicit value terms, the counterparts in other languages of the English "That simply is not done!" Verbal explanation as well as context is needed to understand nonlinguistic signs of evaluation, including sanctions. Not every spanking is a punishment: it may only express parental ill temper. Not every smile is a sign of joy: it may only express
VARIANCE, ANALYSIS OF incomprehension. Silent approvals and disapprovals have observable cues: "thumbs up" and "thumbs down" are specific examples. Distinctively different meanings of a single nonlinguistic form, for example, hissing, have also to be mastered. Extracting a cultural value system from the flow of discourse and actions requires a method not unlike Socratic midwifery. By questioning and observing individuals and subjecting their responses to logical analysis, we discover not only what is commonly expressed but also what is commonly believed but left inexplicit, because it is "taken for granted" by everyone in the culture. To avoid oversimplifications, inquiry must be directed to discovering the relativity of values to situations: solemnity is right in church, gaiety at weddings or funerals— depending on the culture. Since no value system is a perfect fit to life conditions, each contains socially acceptable alternatives to formally established principles. These secondary rules and norms permit individuals to come to terms with reality without running afoul of society. Even where truth is sovereign, a falsehood that saves lives or prevents gratuitous suffering is generally applauded. At the other end of the values continuum, in a strict, patriarchal society, the strong-willed wife of a weakling may run the household without causing scandal. Complex and varied, cultural value systems encompass the culturally unique and the universally human. Progressive refinement of every aspect of the endeavor is the goal of continuing research in the comparative study of cultural value systems. Interdependence among the social-behavioral sciences often makes progress in one dependent on progress in others. As research in values moves toward exploration of their relations to other phenomena, it becomes increasingly interdependent with other research interests—notably study of the nature of culture and definition of its constituent features and dynamics and research in verbal behavior, cognitive mapping, linguistics, systematics, and descriptive semantics. Scholars from many different cultures increasingly participate in social-behavioral inquiry. Cross-cultural perspective is perhaps the most promising single factor for refining and enriching our comprehension of cultural value systems. ETHEL M. ALBERT BIBLIOGRAPHY
ALBERT, ETHEL M. 1956 The Classification of Values: A Method and Illustration. American Anthropologist New Series 58:221-248. ALBERT, ETHEL M.; and KLUCKHOHN, CLYDE 1959 A Selected Bibliography on Values, Ethics, and Esthetics
291
in the Behavioral Sciences and Philosophy, 1920—1958. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. EDEL, MAY; and EDEL, ABRAHAM 1959 Anthropology and Ethics. Springfield, 111.: Thomas. FIRTH, RAYMOND 1951 Elements of Social Organization. London: Watts. -» A paperback edition was published in 1963. FIRTH, RAYMOND 1953 The Study of Values by Social Anthropologists. Man 53:146—153. GILLIN, JOHN P. 1948 The Ways of Men: An Introduction to Anthropology. New York: Appleton. GOLDSCHMIDT, WALTER R. 1953 Values and the Field of Comparative Sociology. American Sociological Review 18:287-293. HALL, EDWARD T. 1959 The Silent Language. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. -» A paperback edition was published in 1961 by Fawcett. HERSKOVITS, MELVILLE J. 1955 Cultural Relativism and Cultural Values. Pages 348-366 in Melville J. Herskovits, Cultural Anthropology. New York: Knopf. KLUCKHOHN, CLYDE 1951 Values and Value-orientations in the Theory of Action: An Exploration in Definition and Classification. Pages 388-433 in Talcott Parsons and Edward A. Shils (editors), Toward a General Theory of Action. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. KLUCKHOHN, CLYDE 1956 Toward a Comparison of Value-emphases in Different Cultures. Pages 116-132 in Leonard D. White (editor), The State of the Social Sciences. Univ. of Chicago Press. KLUCKHOHN, FLORENCE R.; and STRODTBECK, FRED L. 1961 Variations in Value Orientations. Evanston, 111.: Row, Peterson. LADD, JOHN 1957 The Structure of a Moral Code: A Philosophical Analysis of Ethical Discourse Applied to the Ethics of the Navaho Indians. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. LEE, DOROTHY 1948 Are Rasic Needs Ultimate? Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 43:391-395. MACBEATH, ALEXANDER 1952 Experiments in Living: A Study of the Nature and Foundation of Ethics or Morals in the Light of Recent Work in Social Anthropology. London: Macmillan. MORRIS, CHARLES W. 1956 Varieties of Human Value. Univ. of Chicago Press. NADEL, SIEGFRIED F. 1951 The Foundations of Social Anthropology. London: Cohen & West; Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. PARSONS, TALCOTT (1938-1953) 1954 Essays in Sociological Theory. Rev. ed. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. -> A paperback edition was published in 1964. PEPPER, STEPHEN C. 1958 The Sources of Value. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press. REDFIELD, ROBERT 1955 The Little Community: Viewpoints for the Study of a Human Whole. Univ. of Chicago Press. SIEGEL, BERNARD J. 1948 Currents of Anthropological Theory and Value Concepts. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 4:199-210. VOGT, EVON Z.; and ALBERT, ETHEL M. (editors) 1966 People of Rimrock: A Study of Values in Five Cultures. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press.
VAN GENNEP, ARNOLD See GENNEP, ARNOLD VAN. VARIANCE, ANALYSIS OF See under LINEAR HYPOTHESES.
292
VARIANCES, STATISTICAL STUDY OF
VARIANCES, STATISTICAL STUDY OF This article discusses statistical procedures related to the dispersion, or variability, of observations. Many such procedures center on the variance as a measure of dispersion, but there are other parameters measuring dispersion, and the most important of these are also considered here. This article treats motivation for studying dispersion, parameters describing dispersion, and estimation and testing methods for these parameters. Some synonyms or near synonyms for "variability" or "dispersion" are "diversity," "spread," "heterogeneity," and "variation." "Entropy" is often classed with these. Why study variability? In many contexts interest is focused on variability, with questions of central tendency of secondary importance—or of no importance at all. The following are examples from several disciplines illustrating the interest in variability. Economics. The inequality in wealth and income has long been a subject of study. Yntema (1933) uses eight different parameters to describe this particular variability; Bowman (1956) emphasizes curves as a tool of description [cf. Wold 1935 for a discussion of Gini's concentration curve and Kolmogorov 1958-1960 for Levy's function of concentration; see also INCOME DISTRIBUTION]. Industry. The variability of industrial products usually must be small, if only in order that the products may fit as components into a larger system or that they may meet the consumer's demands; the methods of quality control serve to keep this variability (and possible trends with time) in check. [An elementary survey is Dudding 1952; more modern methods are presented in Keen & Page 1953; Page 1962; 1963; see also QUALITY CONTROL, STATISTICAL.] Psychology. Two groups of children, selected at random from a given grade, were given a reasoning test under different amounts of competitive stress; the group under higher stress had the larger variation in performance. (The competitive atmosphere stimulated the brighter children, stunted the not-sobright ones: see Hays 1963, p. 351; for other examples, see Siegel 1956, p. 148; Maxwell I960; Hirsch 1961, p. 478.) General approaches to the study of variability The simplest approach to the statistical study of variability consists in the computation of the sample value of some statistic relating to dispersion [see STATISTICS, DESCRIPTIVE, article on LOCATION AND DISPERSION]. Conclusions as to the statistical
significance or scientific interpretation of the resulting value, however, usually require selection of a specified family, 0, of probability distributions to represent the phenomenon under study. The choice of this family will reflect the theoretical framework within which the investigator performs his experiment^). In particular, one or several of the parameters of the distributions of B will correspond to the notion of variability that is most relevant to the investigator's special problem. The need for the selection of a specified underlying family, ff, is typical for statistical methodology in general and has the customary consequences : ideally speaking, each specified underlying family, f}, should have a corresponding statistic (or statistical procedure) adapted to it; even if a standard statistic (for example, variance) can be used, its significance and interpretation may vary widely with the underlying family. Unfortunately, the choice of such a family is not always selfevident, and hence the interpretation of statistical results is sometimes subject to considerable "specification error." [See ERRORS, article on EFFECTS OF ERRORS IN STATISTICAL ASSUMPTIONS.]
Two of the special families of probability distributions that will not be discussed in this article are connected with the methods of factor analysis and of variance components in the analysis of variance. The factor analysis method analyzes a sample of N observations on an n-dimensional vector (X T , Xo, • • • , X n ) by assuming that the Xj (i = 1, • • • , rz) are linear combinations of a random error term, a (hopefully small) number of "common factors," and possibly a number of "specific factors." (These assumptions determine a family, -7.) Interest focuses on the coefficients in the linear combinations (factor loadings). Unfortunately, the method lacks uniqueness in principle. [See FACTOR ANALYSIS; see also the survey by Henrysson 1957.] The variance components method, in one of its simpler instances, analyzes scalar-valued observations, xiik (k = 1, • • • , 7i i y ), on ni} individuals, observed under conditions (Sa (i = 1, • • • , r; j = 1, • • • , s ) , starting from the assumption that Xi^ — fju + ai + bj + Cn + eijk, where the a^, bj, c^-, eijk are independent normal random variables with mean 0 and variances
VARIANCES, STATISTICAL STUDY OF urement used: classificatory (or nominal), partially ordered, ordered (or ordinal), metric (denned below), and so forth. [See PSYCHOMETRICS and STATISTICS, DESCRIPTIVE, for further discussion of scales of measurement.] With each scale are associated transformations that may be applied to the observations and that leave the essential results of the measurement process intact. It is generally felt that parameters and statistical methods should in some sense be invariant under these associated transformations. (For dissenting opinions, see Lubin 1962, pp. 358-359.) As an example, consider a classificatory scale. Measurement in this case means putting an observed unit into one of several unordered qualitative categories (for instance, never married, currently married, divorced, widowed). Whether these categories are named by English words, by the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, by the numbers 3, 2, 1, 4, by the numbers 100, 101, 250, 261, or by the letters A, B, C, D does not change the classification as such. Hence, whatever it is that statistical methods extract from classification data should not depend on the names (or the transformations of the names) of the categories. Thus, even if the categories have numbers for their names, as above, it would be meaningless to compute the sample variance from a sample. Parameters in general. Given a family, 0, of probability distributions, an identifiable parameter is a numerical-valued function defined on 9. Let P be a generic member of <9, and let m be a positive integer. Most of the parameters for describing dispersion discussed in this article can be defined as EPg(XltXs,
••-,XW),
where X x , X,, • • • , Xm are independently and identically distributed according to P and g is an appropriate real-valued function. For example, the variance may be defined as EP[^(X1 — X 2 ) 2 ]. Given a family, £?, of probability distributions, one evidently has a wide choice of parameters (choosing a different g will usually yield a different parameter). Different parameters will characterize (slightly or vastly) different aspects of &. For instance, part of the disagreement between the eight methods of assessing variability described by Yntema (1933) stems from the fact that they represent different parameters. Of course, it is sometimes very useful to have more than one measure of dispersion available. Dispersion parameters. A listing and comparison of various dispersion parameters for some of the scales mentioned above will now be given. Parameters for classificatory scales. In a classificatory scale let there be q categories, with prob-
293
abilities 0* (i = 1, 2, • • • , < ? ) ; Si#i = 1. The dispersion parameter chosen should be invariant under name change of the categories, so it should depend on the Ot only. If all 9, are equal, diversity (variability) is a maximum, and the parameter should have a large value. If one Oi is 1, so that the others are 0, diversity is 0, and the parameter should conventionally have the value 0. A family of parameters having these and other gratifying properties (for example, a weak form of additivity; see Renyi 1961, eqs. (1.20) and (1.21)) is given by : (I -n-Vnoffofy 1 . 0
a>0,
the amount of information of order a (entropy of order a). Note that limH ffl (P) = -
= -E r log,P(X)
is Shannon's amount of information [see INFORMATION THEORY]. This information measure has a stronger additivity property — Blyth (1959) points out that if the values of X are divided into groups, then the dispersion of X - between group dispersion + expected within group dispersion. Miller and Chomsky (1963) discuss linguistic applications. There are other measures of dispersion for classificatory scales besides the information-like ones. (For example, see Greenberg 1956.) Parameters for metric scales. On a metric scale observations are real numbers, and all properties of real numbers may be used. (a) For probability distributions with a density f, there is the information-like parameter H,(f ) = -Eflogz f ( X ) = -ff
(x) log, f (x) dx ** 0,
whenever the integral exists. This parameter is not invariant under arbitrary transformations of the X-line, although it is under translations. (For interesting maximum properties in connection with rectangular, exponential, normal distributions, see Renyi 1962, appendix, sec. 11, exercises 12, 17.) For a normal distribution with standard deviation cr, H,(f) = £log,(o- 2 27rt?). (b) Traditional measures of dispersion for metric scales are the standard deviation, cr ^ 0, and the variance, or- = E/.[(X — ju,) 2 ], where n = ErX. As mentioned above, an alternative definition is half the expectation of the square of the difference of two random variables, X1 and X2 , independently and identically distributed. This definition of cr2 suggests a whole string of so-called mean difference parameters, listed below under (c), (d), and ( e ) ,
294
VARIANCES, STATISTICAL STUDY OF
all of which, like or and cr2, are invariant under translations only. (c) Gini's mean difference is given by
where X (1) = min (X1} X 2 , • • • , X n ) and X ( n ) = max(X1,X2, • • • , X W ) ; and the difference of symmetric quantile points,
J P(doc2).
- X =
where The integral at the right is in general form; if Xi , X2 have the density function f, the integral is
00
= a = ff,
8J =
and f is the density of the probability distribution P. Both these parameters are distribution-dependent functions of cr. Note that this last parameter, the difference of symmetric quantile points, is not based on expected values of random variables. (f) Another dispersion parameter is the coefficient of variation, cr///, (given either as a ratio or in per cent), invented to eliminate the influence of absolute size on variability (for example, to compare the variation in size of elephants and of mice). Sometimes it does exactly that (Banerjee 1962); sometimes it does nothing of the sort (Cramer 1945, table 31.3.5). (For further discussion, see Pearson 1897.) Because they are distribution-dependent functions of cr, the parameters cited under (a), (c), (d), and (e} are undesirable for a study of the variance, cr2, unless one is fairly sure about the underlying family of probability distributions. This will be illustrated below. Despite this drawback, these parameters are, of course, quite satisfactory as measures of dispersion in their own right. Comparison of dispersion measures. Table 1 lists the quotient of several of the above-mentioned parameters divided by cr, together with other relevant quantities. It gives these comparisons for the distributions of the types listed in the first column, with parameter specifications as indicated in the next two columns. The parameterization is the same as that in DISTRIBUTIONS, STATISTICAL, article on SPECIAL CONTINUOUS DISTRIBUTIONS.) The sign "~" before an entry denotes an asymptotic result (for large n or large /u). Table 1 illustrates how
Wold (1935, pp. 48-49) points out the relationship between this parameter and Cramer's o>2 method for testing goodness of fit. As can be seen in Table 1, below, Gini's mean difference is a distributiondependent function of cr. There are variate difference parameters that involve the square of "higher-order differences"; they are distribution-free functions of cr. An example is
There are also variate difference parameters involving the absolute value of higher-order differences; they are distribution-dependent functions of cr. An example is
(d) By analogy with the first definition of the variance, there are dispersion parameters reflecting absolute variation around some measure of central tendency. Examples are the mean deviation from the mean, /u,, 8M = EP\X — JJL\ , and from the median, MedX,
These are distribution-dependent functions of cr. (e) There are dispersion parameters based on other differences. Two examples are the expected value of range of samples of size n, E,,Wn = E P [ X ( n ) - X ( 1 } ] ,
Table I — A comparison of dispersion parameters Parameters of distribution
Distributional form
a
n
Coefficient of
Ratios of mean difference to ff
variation
MedX
ff/fJ:
S\/ff
«i/«r
Normal
cr
P
P>
cr/n
Exponential
e
0
6 \oge 2
1
2/V^F i
Double exponential
A
A
^V2/A
3V2/16
b—a
b+a
b+a
b-a
2V3
2
2
V3(^+a)
2/V3
b
Rectangular
a. Here 7 is Euler's constant: y = 0.5772157. . . . b. Not known from the literature.
5M/
S.Mod/oV2/7T
EW»/ff
2V3/7T
V2/7T
16/9
2/e
loge 2 - y + loge W
b
IV2
iV2
-V2[y+ lo g e (VV2)]'
iV/3
i\/3
2^3^^^
^2V21og e Tl
- / w-l\
VARIANCES, STATISTICAL STUDY OF bad the distribution dependence of these parameters can really be. [See ERRORS, article on NONSAMPLING ERRORS, for further discussion.] Multivariate distributions. Most of the parameters discussed for univariate distributions can be generalized to multivariate distributions, usually in more than one fashion. The variance, for instance, is the expected value of one-half the square of the distance between two random points on the real line. Generalization may be attained by taking the distance between two random points in k-space or by taking the content of a polyhedron spanned by k + 1 points in fc-space. Thus, a rather great variety of multivariate dispersion parameters are possible. [See MULTIVARIATE ANALYSIS and, for example, van der Vaart 1965.] Statistical inference Shannon's amount of information. Consider, first, point estimation of Shannon's amount of information for discrete distributions. Suppose a sample of size n is drawn from the probability distribution, with q categories and probabilities 6i , described earlier. Suppose HI observations fall in the zth category; Ei=1 ni - n. Then
suggests itself as the natural estimator for H t (P) = — Z);0; log? Oi . The properties of this estimator have been studied by Miller and Madow (1954) and (by a simpler method) by Basharin (1959). The sampling distribution of fi has mean •Iog 2 e + 0 -s(The term O( 1/n2) denotes a function of n and the 61 such that for some positive constant, c, the absolute value of the function is less than c/rc2.) So for "small" n the bias, the difference between Efi and H^P), is substantial. [For low-bias estimators, see Blyth 1959; for a general discussion of point estimation, see ESTIMATION, article on POINT ESTIMATION.]
The variance of one population. Procedures for estimating the variance of a single population and for testing hypotheses about such a variance will now be described. Pomt estimation for general 0. Let the underlying family, 9^., consist of all probability distributions with density functions and known mean, /JL, or of all discrete distributions with known mean, fji. In both cases the theory of [/-statistics (see, for
295
example, Fraser 1957, pp. 135-147) shows that the minimum variance unbiased estimator of cr2, given a sample of size n, is c2 —
_ \ ^
TO
Note that the sampling variance, var p (s 2 ), which measures the precision of the estimator relative to the underlying distribution, P (a member of £?n), is definitely distribution dependent. If £3 is, again, the family of all absolutely continuous (or discrete) distributions now with unknown mean, then the uniformly minimum variance unbiased estimator of cr 2 is 1 2 n - 1 Z_-< v * '' where x is the sample mean. Again, var p (s 2 ) is very much distribution dependent. For more restricted families of distributions it is sometimes possible to find other estimators, with smaller sampling variances. Also, if the unbiasedness requirement is dropped, one may find estimators that, although biased, are, on the average, closer to the true parameter value than a minimum variance unbiased estimator: for the family of normal distributions, 1 n+I
- X*)
is such an estimator of
— 2rr4
Exponential
-8cr 4
Double exponential
-32tr 4 n
Rectangular
- (4/5)0-
n
n
Pearson type VIlb
P>5/2) a. The reader should add a term O(l/n2) to each entry. b. Example is due to Hotelling 1961, p. 350.
296
VARIANCES, STATISTICAL STUDY OF
distribution and N a normal one) may vary from 2/5 to oo. Hence, unless 0 can be chosen in a responsible way, little can be said about the precision of s2 as an estimator of az (although for large samples the higher sample moments will be of some assistance in evaluating the precision of this estimator). Normal distributions. Tests and confidence intervals on dispersion parameters for the case of normal distributions will now be discussed. In order to decide whether a sample of n observations may have come from a population with known variance, cr 2 , or from a more heterogeneous one, test the hypothesis H 0 : a2 = cr20 against the one-sided alternative H ( j>: or- > cr 2 , where cr2 is the (unknown) variance characterizing the sample (Rao 1952, sec. 6a.l, gives a concrete example of the use of this one-sided alternative). In order to investigate only whether the sample fits into the given population in terms of homogeneity, test H 0 : cr2 = cr2 against H(2): cr2 ^ o-2, where H(j° is a two-sided alternative. If the underlying family is normal, the most powerful level-a test for the one-sided alternative rejects H0 whenever
y (x — Xs)2 = s2 > o-2v2 n
Z_< \^i i=l
•*)
— ° -^ "oXl-a.n-l '
where xln-i is trie 1008 per cent point of the chisquare distribution for n - 1 degrees of freedom (so that Xi-a.n-i is the upper lOOa per cent point of the same distribution). [For further discussion of these techniques and the terminology, see HYPOTHESIS TESTING.] The most powerful unbiased level-a test for the two-sided alternative rejects H0 whenever S2 < o-20C1
or
S2 > o-2C2.
Here C, = x*.n., = xL +1 > and C2 = xt^ = xtv,n+1> with (3 + y = a = X + v (see Lehmann 1959, chapter 5, sec. 5, example 5, and pp. 165 and 129; for tables, see Lindley et al. I960: a = 0.05, 0.01, 0.001). In practice the nonoptimal equal-tail test is also used, where C^x^i and C 2 = XHU-I > with p = y — \CL. For the latter test the standard chi-square tables suffice, and the two tests differ only slightly unless the sample size is very small. The one-sided and two-sided confidence intervals follow immediately from the above inequalities; for example, a two-sided confidence interval for cr2 at level a. is S 2 /C 1
reader to learn that the tests and confidence interval procedures discussed above are not robust against nonnormality. Little has been done in developing tests or confidence intervals for cr2 when Qis unknown or broad. Hotelling (1961, p. 356) recommends using all available knowledge to narrow B down to a workable family of distributions, then adapting statistical methods to the resulting family. Mean square differences. For a large family of absolutely continuous distributions with unknown mean, the minimum variance unbiased estimator, s 2 , was introduced above. An alternative formula is 2rz(n This formula suggests another estimator of 2cr2, unbiased, but not with minimum variance: 1 n- 1
If the indices 1, 2, • • • , n in the sample xl, x2, • • • , xn indicate an ordering of some kind (for example, the order of arrival in a time series), then df is called the first mean square successive difference. Similarly,
the second mean square successive difference, is an unbiased estimator of 6cr2. If the underlying family, <9, is normal, then asymptotically (for large n) var
3cr4 n
var -TT
3.89cr4 n
(see Kamat 1958). These estimators, although clearly less precise than s 2 , are of interest because they possess a special kind of robustness—against trend. Suppose the observations xly • • • , xn have been taken at times ^, • • • , tn from a time process, X(£) = (£(£)+ Y, where is a smoothly varying function (trend) of t, and the distribution of the random variable Y is independent of t (for example, $ might describe an expanding economy and Y the fluctuations in it). Let an estimator be sought for var(Y). Most of the trend is then eliminated by considering only the successive differences Xi - xi+i = <£(ti) - 0(t i+ i) +yt- yi+i, thus making for an estimator of var(Y) with much less bias. These methods have been applied to control and record charts by Keen and Page (1953), for example.
VARIANCES, STATISTICAL STUDY OF Little work has been done on studying the sampling distributions of successive difference estimators in cases where the underlying distribution is nonnormal. Moore (1955) gave moments and approximations of d\ for four types of distributions. The standard deviation of one population. Since or = Vo5, one might feel that the standard deviation, or, should be estimated by the square root of a reasonable estimator of a2. This is, indeed, often done, and for large sample sizes the results are quite acceptable. For smaller sample sizes, however, the suboptimality of such estimators is more marked (specifically, Es2 ^ or; if the underlying family is normal, an unbiased estimator is
where F is the gamma function). Therefore, there has been some interest in alternative estimators, like those now to be described. Estimation via alternative parameters. In Table 1 it was pointed out that, depending on the underlying family, £?, of distributions, certain relations exist between a- and other dispersion parameters, 6, of the form 6 = v^ cr. So if one knows 0, one may estimate 0 by, say, T(x), apply the conversion factor l/v&, and find an unbiased estimator of cr. Thus, the mean successive differences,
n- 1 dl =
+i
~T~
are, if & is normal, unbiased estimators of 2cr/ VTT and 2crV3/7r, respectively, with sampling variances (see Kamat 1958) given by
var
0.826Q-2 n
VTT-
_ d . ) = 1.0620"
var
M
(Here the term o( 1/n) denotes a function that, after multiplication by n, goes to zero as n becomes large. ) See Lomnicki (1952) for the sampling variance of [n(n — l)]'1!^!^!^ — Xj\, Gini's mean difference, for normal, exponential, and rectangular Q. Again, if
,
ft U,
m
1 V1
—- / \ -
n / ^
-
— i/V "V
and 9 is normal, then dm\/ (?7/2)[(n — 1 )/n] is an unbiased estimator of cr; its sampling variance is
297
var(d w VOr/2)[(TO-l)/TO]) -2 -2 which is close to the absolute lower bound, cr2/ (2n). The properties of
d
^
where Me(^c) is the sample median, differ slightly, yet favorably, from those of dm. The literature on these and similar statistics is quite extensive. The last column of Table 1 suggests the use of the sample range, Wn = X ( n ) — X ( 1 ) , to estimate cr; the conversion factor now depends on both the underlying distribution and the sample size, n (for normal distributions, see David 1962, p. 113, table 7A.1). With increasing n, the precision of converted sample ranges as estimators of a decreases rapidly. One may then shift to quasi ranges (X ( ,,_ r+1) — X ( r ) ) or, better still, to linear combinations of quasi ranges (see David 1962, p. 107). The use of quasi ranges to obtain confidence intervals for interquantile distances (^-a — £«) was also discussed by Chu (1957). This type of estimator employs order statistics. A more efficient use of order statistics is made by the so-called best unbiased linear systematic statistics and by approximations to these [for more information, see NONPARAMETRIC STATISTICS, article On ORDER STATISTICS]. These linear systematic statistics are especially useful in case the data are censored [see STATISTICAL ANALYSIS, SPECIAL PROBLEMS OF, article on TRUNCATION AND CENSORSHIP]. It should also be mentioned that grouping of data poses special problems for the use of estimators based on order statistics [see STATISTICAL ANALYSIS, SPECIAL PROBLEMS OF, article on GROUPED OBSERVATIONS]. Comparing variances of several populations. As in the example of increased variation on a reasoning test with competitive stress, discussed above, it appears that situations will occur in which interest is focused on differences in variability as the response to differences in conditions. Two groups were compared in the example, but the situation can easily be generalized to more than two groups. Thus, one may want to apply more than two levels of competitive stress, and one may even bring in a second factor of the environment, such as different economic backgrounds (in which case one would have a two-way classification). Bartlett's test and the F-test. Consider k populations and k samples, one from each population (in the reasoning-test example, each group of chil-
298
VARIANCES, STATISTICAL STUDY OF
dren under a given level of stress would constitute one sample). Let the observations xrl, xr2, • • • , xrnr be a random sample from the rth population ( r = 1, • • - , & ) . Let
Define where
Sz =
ri
- xr~)2
n
and vr - nr - 1,
and
Bartlett's 1937 test of the hypothesis H 0 : the k variances are equal, against HA: not all variances are equal, assumes all samples to be drawn from normal distributions and rejects H0 if and only if the statistic L is too large, where
L= n-
The true values of the means of the k populations do not influence the outcome of this test. The distribution of L is known to be chi-square, with k— 1 degrees of freedom, for large samples; for samples of intermediate size, it is desirable to use, as a closer approximation, the fact that L / ( l + c), where 1 3(fe- 1)
J_ vr
L_V
n —k J
has approximately the same chi-square distribution. Bartlett's test is unbiased. Against these virtues there is one outstanding weakness: the test has total lack of robustness against nonnormality [see ERRORS, article on EFFECTS OF ERRORS IN STATISTICAL ASSUMPTIONS]. For k = 2, Bartlett's test reduces to a variant of the F-test: reject H 0 : cr1 = cr2, if SI/SI > (v 1 /^ 2 )F 1 _ a::Vl!V2 , where F 1 _ a;Vl> v 2 is the upper lOOa per cent point of the F-distribution for vv and v2 degrees of freedom. The F-test in this context naturally has the same lack of robustness against nonnormality as Bartlett's test. Alternate test for variance heterogeneity. Bartlett and Kendall (1946) proposed an alternative approach: apply analysis of variance techniques to the logarithms of the k sample variances. The virtue of this suggestion is that the procedure can be generalized immediately to a test of variances in a two-way classification. Box (1953, p. 330) showed that this test, too, is nonrobust against non-
normality. More robust procedures are described below. Variances of two correlated samples. McHugh (1953) quotes a study of the effect of age on dispersion of mental abilities; the same group of persons was measured at two different ages. Naturally the two samples are correlated, and the F-test does not apply. Under the assumption that the pairs (*u, #21), • • • , (#ii, *2i), • • • , ( x ] n , x.,n) constitute a sample from a bivariate normal distribution with variances or2 and cr| and correlation coefficient p, the hypothesis He: crf/cr2 = 6 is tested by the statistic a —
V4S 2 S 2 0(1 -r 2 )
where S2 and S2 are as defined in the discussion of Bartlett's test, above, and r is the sample correlation coefficient. The statistic Tff is distributed under the null hypothesis as Student's t with n — 2 degrees of freedom. One-sided tests, two-sided tests, and confidence intervals follow in the customary manner. Specifically, the hypothesis H x : a\~ erf is tested by means of the statistic V4S 2 S 2 (1-r 2 ) This method, which was proposed by Morgan (1939) and Pitman (1939), is based on the easily derived fact that the covariance between X + Y and X — Y is the difference between the variances of X and Y, so that the correlation between the sum and difference of the random variables is zero if and only if the variances are equal. Testing for variance-heterogeneity preliminary to ANOVA. The analysis of variance assumes equality of variance from cell to cell. Hence, it is sometimes proposed that the data be run through a preliminary test to check this assumption, also called that of homoscedasticity; variance heterogeneity is also called heteroscedasticity. There are two objections to this procedure. First, the same data are subjected to two different statistical procedures, so the two results are not independent. Hence, a special theoretical investigation is needed to find out what properties such a double procedure has (see Kitagawa 1963). Second (see Box 1953, p. 333), one should not use Bartlett's test for such a preliminary analysis, because of its extreme lack of robustness against nonnormality: one might discard as heteroscedastic data that are merely nonnormal, whereas the analysis of variance is rather robust against nonnormality. (An additional important point is that analysis of variance is fairly robust against variance heterogeneity, at least
VARIANCES, STATISTICAL STUDY OF with equal numbers in the various cells.) [See SIGNIFICANCE, TESTS OF, for further discussion of preliminary tests.] In view of the relative robustness of range methods, Hartley's suggestion (1950, pp. 277-279) of testing for variance heterogeneity by means of range statistics is quite attractive. Robust tests against variance heterogeneity. Box (1953, sec. 8) offers a more robust fc-sample test against variance heterogeneity: each of the k samples is broken up into small, equal, exclusive, and exhaustive random subsets, a dispersion statistic is computed for each subset, and the within-sample variation of these statistics is compared with the between-sample variation. (Box 1953 applies an analysis of variance to the logarithms of these statistics; Moses 1963, p. 980, applies a rank test to the statistics themselves.) Another approach applies a permutation test, which amounts to a kurtosis-dependent correction of Bartlett's test (Box & Andersen 1955, p. 23). The results are good, although they are better in the case of known means than in the case of unknown means. Still another procedure uses rank tests [see NONPARAMETRIC STATISTICS, articles on THE FIELD and on RANKING METHODS; see also a survey by van Eeden 1964]. Moses (1963, sees. 3, 4) makes some enlightening remarks about things a rank test for dispersion can and cannot be expected to do. H. ROBERT VAN DER VAART [See also STATISTICS, DESCRIPTIVE, article on LOCATION AND DISPERSION.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
BANERJEE, V. 1962 Experimentelle Untersuchungen zur Giiltigkeit des Variationskoeffizienten V in der Natur, untersucht an zwei erbreinen Populationen einer Wasserlauferart. Biometrische Zeitschrift 4:121-125. BARTLETT, M. S. 1937 Properties of Sufficiency and Statistical Tests. Royal Society of London, Proceedings Series A 160:268-282. BARTLETT, M. S.; and KENDALL, D. G. 1946 The Statistical Analysis of Variance-heterogeneity and the Logarithmic Transformation. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B 8:128-138. BASHARIN, G. P. 1959 On a Statistical Estimate for the Entropy of a Sequence of Independent Random Variables. Theory of Probability and Its Applications 4:333337. -» First published in Russian in the same year, in Teoriia veroiatnostei i ee primeneniia, of which the English edition is a translation, published by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. BLYTH, COLIN R. 1959 Note on Estimating Information. Annals of Mathematical Statistics 30:71-79. BOWMAN, MARY J. 1956 The Analysis of Inequality Patterns: A Methodological Contribution. Metron 18, no. 1/2:189-206.
299
Box, G. E. P. 1953 Non-normality and Tests on Variances. Biometrika 40:318-335. Box, G. E. P.; and ANDERSEN, S. L. 1955 Permutation Theory in the Derivation of Robust Criteria and the Study of Departures From Assumptions. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B 17:1-34. CHU, J. T. 1957 Some Uses of Quasi-ranges. Annals of Mathematical Statistics 28:173-180. CRAMER, HARALD (1945) 1951 Mathematical Methods of Statistics. Princeton Mathematical Series, No. 9. Princeton Univ. Press. DAVID, H. A. 1962 Order Statistics in Short-cut Tests. Pages 94-128 in Ahmed E. Sarhan and Bernard G. Greenberg (editors), Contributions to Order Statistics. New York: Wiley. DUDDING, BERNARD P. 1952 The Introduction of Statistical Methods to Industry. Applied Statistics 1:3-20. FRASER, DONALD A. S. 1957 Nonparametric Methods in Statistics. New York: Wiley. GREENBERG, JOSEPH H. 1956 The Measurement of Linguistic Diversity. Language 32:109-115. HARTLEY, H. O. 1950 The Use of Range in Analysis of Variance. Biometrika 37:271-280. HAYS, WILLIAM L. 1963 Statistics for Psychologists. New York: Holt. HENRYSSON, STEN 1957 Applicability of Factor Analysis in the Behavioral Sciences: A Methodological Study. Stockholm Studies in Educational Psychology, No. 1. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. HIRSCH, JERRY 1961 The Role of Assumptions in the Analysis and Interpretation of Data. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 31:474-480. -» Discussion paper in a symposium on the genetics of mental disease. HOTELLING, HAROLD 1961 The Behavior of Some Standard Statistical Tests Under Non-standard Conditions. Volume 1, pages 319-359 in Berkeley Symposium on Mathematical Statistics and Probability, Fourth, 1960, Proceedings. Edited by Jerzy Neyman. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press. KAMAT, A. R. 1958 Contributions to the Theory of Statistics Based on the First and Second Successive Differences. Metron 19, no. 1/2:97-118. KEEN, JOAN; and PAGE, DENYS J. 1953 Estimating Variability From the Differences Between Successive Readings. Applied Statistics 2:13-23. KITAGAWA, Tosio 1963 Estimation After Preliminary Tests of Significance. University of California Publications in Statistics 3:147-186. KOLMOGOROV, A. N. 1958 Sur les proprietes des fonctions de concentrations de M. P. Levy. Paris, Universite, Institut Henri Poincare, Annales 16:27-34. LEHMANN, E. L. 1959 Testing Statistical Hypotheses. New York: Wiley. LINDLEY, D. V.; EAST, D. A.; and HAMILTON, P. A. 1960 Tables for Making Inferences About the Variance of a Normal Distribution. Biometrika 47:433-437. LOMNICKI, Z. A. 1952 The Standard Error of Gini's Mean Difference. Annals of Mathematical Statistics 23:635-637. LUBIN, ARDIE 1962 Statistics. Annual Review of Psychology 13:345-370. McHucH, RICHARD B. 1953 The Comparison of Two Correlated Sample Variances. American Journal of Psychology 66:314-315. MAXWELL, A. E. 1960 Discrepancies in the Variances of Test Results for Normal and Neurotic Children. British Journal of Statistical Psychology 13:165-172.
300
VATTEL, EMER DE
MILLER, GEORGE A.; and CHOMSKY, NOAM 1963 Finitary Models of Language Users. Volume 2, pages 419-491 in R. Duncan Luce, Robert R. Bush, and Eugene Galanter (editors), Handbook of Mathematical Psychology. New York: Wiley. MILLER, GEORGE A.; and MADOW, WILLIAM G. (1954) 1963 On the Maximum Likelihood Estimate of the Shannon-Wiener Measure of Information. Volume 1, pages 448-469 in R. Duncan Luce, Robert R. Bush, and Eugene Galanter (editors), Readings in Mathematical Psychology. New York: Wiley. MOORE, P. G. 1955 The Properties of the Mean Square Successive Difference in Samples From Various Populations. Journal of the American Statistical Association 50:434-456. MORGAN, W. A. 1939 A Test for the Significance of the Difference Between the Two Variances in a Sample From a Normal Bivariate Population. Biometrika 31: 13-19. MOSES, LINCOLN E. 1963 Rank Tests of Dispersion. Annals of Mathematical Statistics 34:973-983. PAGE, E. S. 1962 Modified Control Chart With Warning Lines. Biometrika 49:171-176. PAGE, E. S. 1963 Controlling the Standard Deviation by Cusums and Warning Lines. Technometrics 5:307315. PEARSON, KARL 1897 On the Scientific Measure of Variability. Natural Science 11:115-118. PITMAN, E. J. G. 1939 A Note on Normal Correlation. Biometrika 31:9-12. RAO, C. RADHAKRISHNA 1952 Advanced Statistical Methods in Biometric Research. New York: Wiley. RENYI, ALFRED 1961 On Measures of Entropy and Information. Volume 1, pages 547-561 in Berkeley Symposium on Mathematical Statistics and Probability, Fourth, 1960, Proceedings. Edited by Jerzy Neyman. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press. RENYI, ALFRED 1962 Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung, mit einem Anhang iiber Informationstheorie. Berlin: Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften. SIEGEL, SIDNEY 1956 Nonparametric Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences. New York: McGraw-Hill. VAN DER VAART, H. ROBERT 1965 A Note on Wilks' Internal Scatter. Annals of Mathematical Statistics 36: 1308-1312. VAN EEDEN, CONSTANCE 1964 Note on the Consistency of Some Distribution-free Tests for Dispersion. Journal of the American Statistical Association 59:105-119. WOLD, HERMAN 1935 A Study on the Mean Difference, Concentration Curves and Concentration Ratio. Metron 12, no. 2:39-58. YNTEMA, DWIGHT B. 1933 Measures of the Inequality in the Personal Distribution of Wealth or Income. Journal of the American Statistical Association 28:423-433.
VATTEL, EMER DE Emer de Vattel (1714-1767) was a Swiss diplomat and legal scholar who is remembered primarily for his great work, Le droit des gens: Ou, principes de la loi naturelle (1758). The book took many years to write: Vattel gave to it the considerable free time that his position as minister-representative of the king of Saxony to the Republic of Bern
permitted him. In the years during which he was writing his book he suffered severe financial deprivation—the difficult financial situation of Saxony prior to the Seven Years' War meant that even the niggardly salary promised him arrived with great delays—and he received scant appreciation in the academic world. Only after his book was published did he receive attention from both statesmen and scholars. From the very outset Le droit des gens occasioned the most divergent scholarly appraisals. In 1785, D. H. L. von Ompteda asserted, as many others did subsequently, that Vattel was merely a loyal follower of his great predecessor, Christian Wolff. Ompteda claimed that Vattel had "carefully followed" Wolff not only in his arrangement of the work "but also in his train of thought." The only positive achievement he credited to Vattel was to have presented "in a pleasant, natural style" the theorems that Wolff had stated in "dry, mathematical form," so that Vattel's book is "almost the only existing work on the natural law of nations that is suitable for statesmen and persons not in the learned professions . . . and this is undoubtedly his great service to the science of international law" (1785, pp. 345-346). Ompteda was damning Vattel with faint praise, impugning not only his originality but also (and again like many others) his profundity. Another frequent criticism —-that Vattel's statements lack concreteness—is also found first in Ompteda. Much more serious, however, is the charge that Vattel abandoned the Grotian tradition, that he gave Grotius the "kiss of Judas" (see, for example, Vollenhoven [1918] 1919, pp. 26 ff.). This charge is based on the supposition that the salience that Vattel gave to the concept of sovereignty means that he denied order in the law of nations. [See the biography of GROTIUS.] Vattel has, of course, also had many enthusiastic adherents; typically, they have been statesmen, diplomats, and arbitrators, rather than scholars. Thus, a few months before the proclamation of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin wrote to Charles W. F. Dumas, the Swiss who had brought him the 1775 edition of Vattel's book: "It [the book] came to us in good season, when the circumstances of a rising state make it necessary frequently to consult the law of nations" (Franklin [1773-1776] 1906, p. 432). References to Vattel's doctrines were particularly numerous in arbitration verdicts and diplomatic notes at a time when arbitration was in its infancy. Vattel found particular favor in the decisions of American courts, because his view of the nature of international rela-
VATTEL, EMER DE tions accorded with the concepts of the young American republic, jealous as it was of its sovereign rights (Dickinson 1932, p. 259, fn. 132). This is not to say that Vattel has received no appreciation in the scholarly literature of international law; however, his work has been recognized primarily but not exclusively by authors who emphasize the needs of political practice (e.g., Mohl [1855-1858] 1960, vol. 1, p. 386). The social order. Vattel's point of departure may be found in the seventeenth century's philosophy of society, or, more particularly, in the general concern with the transformation of the socalled state of nature into that social life which is subject to an order based on positive law. He was content to deduce the drives that underlie organized society—for example, sociability, self-preservation, or the pursuit of happiness—from an abstract, ahistorical conception of human nature. More central for him was the problem of the relationship and the obligation of the social order to the divine will. For Vattel, as for his teacher Wolff, the concept of what is just, or honorable, is founded upon what is utilitarian, this being the natural motive of all human actions. There can be no other basis for the observance of rules of behavior among men, since both man's social nature and his personal happiness require that conduct be so motivated. But this is a "noble utility," one that serves the perfecting of man's soul, his body, and his wellbeing; there is, therefore, no contradiction between the utilitarian and the honorable, but rather an identity (1747, pp. 21 ff.). The divine will is not the immediate foundation of human morality, as it is in the work of earlier philosophers such as Samuel von Pufendorf and Jean Barbeyrac, but serves rather to reinforce moral obligation founded upon utility. Unlike his predecessors, Vattel saw no contradiction between natural law and positive (or political) law, but instead believed the two to be in agreement (1747, p. 89). [See NATURAL LAW.] The state. Vattel attributed a central position to the sovereign state and defined it in a manner that anticipates the modern definition of the state, as well as its application in international relations: "Every Nation which governs itself, under whatever form, and which does not depend on any other Nation is a sovereign State" (1758, book 1, chapter 1, par. 4). [See STATE.] The state had only recently been conceived as a single personality—most notably by Hobbes—so that in Vattel's time an exposition of political organizations and, especially, of forms of govern-
301
ment (this had polemical overtones) seemed necessary, even in connection with a doctrine of the law of nations that was presumably independent of forms of internal government. Probably no other writer before Rousseau drew such far-reaching conclusions from the doctrine of the social contract, supporting the sovereignty of the people as derived from the primordial contract between parties, as against the sovereignty of princes. Democracy is the primordial form of government; the function of princes is merely a derivative one (1758, book 1, pars. 3, 4, 13, 38, 39; Jellinek [1900] 1960, pp. 513 ff.). Rulers who misuse the power entrusted to them should be removed; but this right is reserved to the nation as a whole. [See SOCIAL CONTRACT.] Vattel's acceptance of the dogma of popular sovereignty and of the far-reaching corollaries deduced therefrom does not mean that he was a revolutionary; characteristically, his bold theoretical stand was hedged by practical reservations along the lines of traditional concepts. For instance, having defined princes as subject to the constitution and the law, he then raised them above such restriction and even endowed them with divine properties. International law. Wolff may be considered the first to have transformed the principles of natural law, making them applicable to international law, although elements of this view—without which it was impossible to establish systematically an independent branch of law—are to be found in Barbeyrac. In the Preface to his book on international law, Vattel gave due credit to Wolff (in fact, he had originally intended merely to translate Wolff's book on the law of nations). Thus, in describing what a work on international law should be, Vattel followed Wolff when he wrote: "Such a treatise, as we have remarked before, should consist principally in applying with judgement and discretion the principles of the natural law to the conduct and the affairs of Nations and of sovereigns" (1758, preface). This transformation of the natural law required that states be recognized as legal entities independent of individuals (see Gierke 1913, p. 357; Meinecke [1924] 1962, pp. 224 ff.) and that there be developed a special theory of the origin of international law. Long before Vattel, sovereign nations were considered to be free, in practice, to disregard in their external interrelationships the norms of natural law that were binding within the state; this they might do by either explicit or tacit consensus. But only in Vattel, following Wolff, did the natural law of nations, like the arbitrary, positive law of
302
VATTEL, EMER DE
nations, achieve its own systematic unity as a special branch of moral philosophy and jurisprudence. In his polemic against Grotius, Vattel presented this conception of international law: If with his idea that political societies or Nations live together in mutual interdependence in the state of nature, and that as political bodies they are subject to the Law of Nature, Grotius had considered, in addition, that the law ought to be applied to these new subjects according to their nature, this thoughtful writer would have easily perceived that the natural Law of Nations is a special science; that it gives rise among Nations even to an exterior obligation independent of their will, and that the consent of Nations is the foundation and the source only of that particular division of the Law of Nations which is called the "arbitrary Law of Nations." (1758, preface)
Having thus established the basis for a systematic doctrine of autonomous sources of international law, Vattel came to his celebrated definition of the subject: "Le droit des gens est la science du droit qui a lieu entre les nations ou fitats et des obligations qui repondent a ce droit" ("The law of nations is the science of the law that operates among nations or states, and of the obligations that conform to that law"; 1758, volume 3, book 1, par. 3). But for all that Vattel was concerned with the autonomous sources of international law, his system, in effect, accorded such far-reaching powers to the sovereign states that the precepts and prohibitions of natural law lost even more of their practical value than they had lost already. For Vattel the norms, of natural law were supplanted by treaties based upon the will of the sovereign states and by tradition. His view thus paved the way for a positive theory of an international law based upon the common will of nations, which triumphed in the second half of the nineteenth century. Vattel's work covered nearly all the problems of international law: acquisition of territory, boundaries, right of intervention, rights of aliens, validity and interpretation of treaties, peaceful settlement of disputes, and laws of war and neutrality. Although he may have lacked originality, he undoubtedly had common sense. In any case, his importance derives from his ability to recognize the highly controversial problems at the core of international relations and to define his position on them. This quality, together with his "pleasant, natural style," permitted him to communicate with and to influence those responsible for handling international affairs. Vattel's systematic exposition of international law has borne his name throughout the world. Translated into many languages, his work affected
the practice of international law for decades, even for centuries. Finally, Vattel owes his success to the fact that in his endeavors to perceive the foundations of international law he never lost sight of the proper aim of international settlements: the realization of an order based on freedom and in accord with the principles of humanity. PAUL GUGGENHEIM [Guides to related articles may be found under INTERNATIONAL LAW; LAW.] WORKS BY VATTEL
1747
Le loisir philosophique: Ou, pieces diverses de philosophic, de morale et d'amusement. Geneva: No publisher given. (1758) 1916 Le droit des gens: Ou, principes de la loi naturelle appliques a la conduite et aux affaires des nations et des souverains. 3 vols. Washington: Carnegie Institution of Washington. -> Translated into German in 1959; see the introduction by Paul Guggenheim. Volume 3 was translated into English in 1916 as The Law of Nations. . . . It was reprinted in 1964 by Oceana; all the extracts are from the 1964 edition, except for the translation of Vattel's famous definition, which was provided by the editors. See especially the introduction to the 1916 edition by Albert G. de Lapradelle. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
BEGUELIN, EDOUARD 1929 En souvenir de Vattel. Neuchatel, Universite de, Faculte de Droit, Recueil de travaux [1929] .-33-176. DICKINSON, EDWIN 1932 Changing Concepts and the Doctrine of Incorporation. American Journal of International Law 26:239-260. FRANKLIN, BENJAMIN (1773-1776) 1906 The Writings of Benjamin Franklin. Volume 6: 1773-1776. Edited with an introduction by Albert Henry Smyth. New York: Macmillan. -» See especially pages 432-436. GIERKE, OTTO VON (1913) 1954 Das deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht. Volume 4: Die Staats- und Korporationslehre der Neuzeit. Graz (Austria): Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt. GUGGENHEIM, PAUL 1956 Emer de Vattel et I'etude des relations Internationales en Suisse. Geneve, Universite de, Faculte de Droit, Memoires, 10. Geneva: Georg. JELLINEK, GEORG (1900) 1960 Allgemeine Staatslehre. 3d ed., rev. & enl. Bad Homburg (Germany) : Centner. MEINECKE, FRIEDRICH (1924) 1962 Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d'fctat and Its Place in Modern History. New York: Praeger. -> First published as Die Idee der Staatsrdson in der neueren Geschichte. MOHL, ROBERT VON (1855-1858) 1960 Die Geschichte und Literatur der Staatswissenschaften in Monographien dargestellt. 3 vols. Graz (Austria): Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt. OMPTEDA, DIETRICH H. L. VON 1785 Litteratur des gesammten sowohl natiirlichen als positiven Volkerrechts. 2 vols. in 1. Regensburg (Germany): Montag. -» The translation of the extract in the text was provided by Paul Guggenheim. REEVES, JESSE R. 1909 The Influence of the Law of Nature Upon International Law in the United States. American Journal of International Law 3:547-561.
VEBLEN, THORSTEIN REIBSTEIN, ERNST 1958 Volkerrecht: Eine Geschichte seiner Ideen in Lehre und Praxis. Volume 1: Von der Antike bis zur Aufklarung. Freiburg (Germany): Alber. REMEC, PETER P. 1960 The Position of the Individual in International Law According to Grotius and Vattel. The Hague: Nijhoff. STAUB, HANS 1922 Die volkerrechtlichen Lehren Vattels im Lichte der naturrechtlichen Doktrin: Ein Beitrag zur Grundsgeschichte des Volkerrechts. Berlin: Vahlen. THEVENAZ, HENRI 1957 Vattel: Ou la destinee d'un livre. Annuaire suisse de droit international 14:9—16. VOLLENHOVEN, CORNELIS VON (1918) 1919 Three Stages in the Evolution of the Law of Nations. The Hague: Nijhoff. -» First published in Dutch.
VEBLEN, THORSTEIN Thorstein Bunde Veblen (1857-1929), American sociologist and social critic, was born in Cato, Wisconsin, and brought up on subsistence farms in Wisconsin and Minnesota. His parents had migrated to the United States in 1847 from rural Norway; Veblen was the sixth of 12 children. In that newly settled frontier region the Norwegian immigrants were divided from the Yankee upper class by religious, linguistic, and other cultural barriers. The first-generation immigrants held tenaciously to their ancestral peasant ways. Veblen's father, for example, did not learn English. Even in college, Veblen and his brother Andrew— the first members of the family to attain higher education—were handicapped by lingering difficulties with English, their second language. Their generation tended to be "marginal"—oriented partly to the Yankee and partly to the Norwegian way of life and skeptical of both. In later years Veblen looked upon this kind of skeptical marginality as a stimulus to intellectual creativity, especially among Jews (Essays in Our Changing Order, p. 219). Veblen's own alienation was reinforced by early encounters with the mutual hostility of townspeople and farmers. In 1880 Veblen graduated from Carleton College, Minnesota. After one term at Johns Hopkins, he took his PH.D. in philosophy at Yale in 1884. Failing to find a job because of his agnosticism, he returned to the Minnesota countryside for seven years of reading and rustication. Finally, in 1891, wearing a coonskin cap, he enrolled as a graduate student in economics at Cornell, under J. Laurence Laughlin, who took Veblen with him when he moved to the University of Chicago the following year. Fourteen years on the Chicago faculty were followed by three at Stanford, from 1906 to 1909. He was unemployed in 1910/1911 and then went to the University of Missouri for seven years. In 1918,
303
he left the academic profession—his tenure therein had always been somewhat precarious because of his unorthodox classroom performance and his domestic difficulties—for a brief period of wartime government service, occasional teaching at the New School for Social Research, in New York, and writing. He retired to a California cabin in 1926 and died there three years later in obscurity and poverty. The American Midwest, during Veblen's youth, was the scene of repeated agrarian revolts and urban labor struggles. Many people were receptive to the reformist ideas of Henry George and Edward Bellamy, and scathing attacks on the great corporations by social critics like Henry Lloyd and Upton Sinclair were widely applauded. It was an age of head-on confrontations. But enthusiasm for Populism, radical unionism, Debs's brand of socialism, and for other left-leaning movements was, in Veblen's adult years, gradually eclipsed by increasing support for business and imperialist values. The outcome, which marked a major turning point in American history, was largely settled by 1920, at the expense of the radical protest movements; and Veblen, who was keenly interested in and sympathetic toward these movements, perceived far more clearly than most of his contemporaries the decisiveness of the triumph of business civilization. The study of that great development and of some responses to it became Veblen's life work. This is not to say that Veblen thought that the nature of change was reducible to the clash of business values with protest movements. Instead, he believed it hinged on the long-run, indirect, and often "opaque" interactions of both business values and various institutional norms with the "machine process" (which included, among other key elements, technology). Veblen took no direct part in any social movement. Although basically critical of modern capitalist institutions and culture, he claimed to be a detached observer, above the battle. His ironic wit did not spare his friends; if he did not chastise them as much as he did his foes, he did so enough to support plausibly his claim to objectivity. His general orientation, of course, was unmistakably leftward, and his career is a minor chapter in the history of American radicalism. Main intellectual influences. Although Veblen's major works in the social sciences were produced over four decades and cover a wide variety of concrete topics, their central ideas show a high degree of consistency. This unity derives from the fact that three important intellectual strands run through all of Veblen's work: Darwinian evolution-
304
VEBLEN, THORSTEIN
ism, Utopian anarchism, and Marxism, each of which Veblen developed in an original way. The element in Darwinism that especially influenced Veblen was its implication that individuals have little or no control over the forces of change. His focus on this aspect of historical development helped to correct the overemphasis of the classical economists and of Marx on the role of rational decisions in social life. However, unlike many social scientists of the time, including William Graham Summer, his own teacher at Yale, Veblen implicitly denied the relevance for social science of such other key Darwinian concepts as natural selection, the struggle for existence, and the survival of the fittest. Social Darwinism, he believed, tended only to reinforce capitalist values. Somewhat more important in Veblen's work than evolutionism was the strand of Utopian anarchism. His vague picture of the prehistoric "savage state," in effect a primeval golden age, was based on the conjectural evolutionary theories of the anthropologist L. H. Morgan and on Veblen's own interpretation of anthropological and archeological reports. This idyllic era was characterized by the absence of class hierarchies, states, and organized warfare. By implication Veblen judged social institutions to be "evil" and human instincts to be "good." (More will be said below about his conception of instincts.) Veblen's own ideal, never openly professed, seems to have been the irreverent "masterless man," living frugally but independently in small rural communities too poor to support any overlords. Certain of Veblen's core ideas are strikingly similar to those of Marx, not in terminology but in content. The principal similarities are an emphasis on class and on economic and property institutions as keys to historical change, and the relegation of ideological elements to secondary importance; a belief in the proposition that crises of overproduction are inherent in capitalist economies; a conception of class structure as resting primarily on two mutually antagonistic groups of occupations (in Veblen's case, these two groups consisted of business owners and industrial producers ); a view of the modern state as "an executive committee for businessmen"; and a conviction that states are bound to become involved in militarism and war. Unlike the Marxists, Veblen made little use of such concepts as surplus value, capital accumulation as a stimulus to imperialism, and the inevitability of socialism. Finally, he usually relied on vaguely defined sociological and psychological mechanisms to explain major social changes,
rather than on the kind of tightly reasoned economic analyses used by Marx. Analytical categories. Veblen analyzed human behavior primarily in terms of instincts and habits, and social processes in terms of culture lag. He distinguished three "instincts," all of which he considered benevolent and all of which, in fact, he used as norms: the parental bent, a benevolent feeling toward kin and fellowman; the instinct or sense of workmanship, a desire to maximize production of goods and services and to do a job well for its own sake; and idle curiosity, the most difficult of the three to define. Two interpretations of idle curiosity seem possible. The usual one is that it refers to the norm of disinterested pursuit of scientific knowledge, i.e., the pursuit of such knowledge for its own sake. But it may also be argued that Veblen was aware of the extent to which socioeconomic institutions mold knowledge and ideologies and that he anticipated—however awkwardly—our latter-day sociology of knowledge (Davis 1957). The greater part of human behavior was attributed by Veblen to habit. The more persistent among the patterns of "use and wont" he designated loosely as social institutions. Veblen never classified institutions systematically. Rather, he characterized them broadly by such terms as "patterns of pecuniary emulation" or "patterns of conspicuous consumption" (which we would now call status competition) or, again, as "patterns for the maintenance of national integrity" (i.e., nationalism) or "patterns for the maintenance of the price system" (capitalism). Habits or institutions, unlike instincts, were according to Veblen far from benevolent. Indeed, he maintained that all social institutions have three properties in common: they are predatory; they are wasteful; and they are survivals from earlier historical epochs. Briefly, they are obstacles to Utopia. The concept of culture lag, which Veblen used to analyze social processes, has been widely used by American sociologists to account both for social change and social problems. Change stems mainly from science and technology, and problems are due to the failure of institutions and organizations to keep pace. For example, factories were introduced in Western nations several decades before the institutional arrangements—safety rules, child-labor laws, and retirement pensions—needed to round out the industrialization process were established. On a broader scale, Veblen often contrasted the still-surviving eighteenth-century institutional framework of private property and national sover-
VEBLEN, THORSTEIN eignty with the twentieth-century "machine process" of industrial production, which was severely restricted, he argued, by its archaic eighteenthcentury institutional context. In his later, more outspoken writings Veblen frequently spoke of the "triumph of imbecile institutions." The culture-lag approach has been one of the master concepts of modern social analysis. The realization that technologies may sometimes change faster than the organizational patterns and institutional norms which control their application is a germinal insight. However, Veblen did not adequately recognize that the concept of culture lag may give undue weight to factors of ignorance and drift, at the expense of vested-interest rationality, or that technology may not always change first. Thus, in his books on Germany (1915) and peace (1917) Veblen could readily show the waste created by the chauvinism and colonialism of the Great Powers, but he could not as clearly depict the organic relationship between capitalism, imperialism, and war; hence his interpretation of World War i as a clash between Germany's obsolete yet still potent feudal dynasticism and England's "free institutions," instead of as an inevitable collision between two inherently expanding capitalistic imperialisms. Veblen did not originate the important yet onesided culture-lag approach; the idea is central in Marx and in the emphasis on "survivals" evident in the Darwinian and other evolutionary traditions in social science. However, Veblen's work did give considerable impetus to a culture-lag perspective, although it was left to W. F. Ogburn and others to develop the concept explicitly. Social and economic analysis. Veblen's primary interest was in the analysis of latter-day industrial society, but characteristically he took a long historical view. Thus, in his Instinct of Workmanship (1914) he attempted a social-evolutionary analysis of stages preceding the emergence of modern society. He divided social evolution into two great phases : the prehistoric "savage state" and the "predatory society." Except for the unduly idyllic description of the former phase, Veblen's outlines of social evolution roughly parallel those of such later authorities as V. Gordon Childe and Leslie White. He saw the snail-like advance of technology ultimately producing, in the hunting-and-gathering economy of the savage state, an economic surplus, which was decisively enlarged by the appearance of agriculture. Society then took on a modern cast, with the development of property, classes, the state,
305
priesthoods, and war. Predatory society, or historic times, has had two main subdivisions, according to Veblen: barbarism, wherein coercion was exercised directly by military and priestly agencies; and pecuniary times, the postmedieval age, wherein exploitation was effected by roundabout, semipeaceable methods. In turn, pecuniary society may be subdivided into the handicraft era (early modern Western times) and the machine age (the last two centuries). Veblen emphasized the wasteful nature of pecuniary institutions and their intrinsic bent toward crisis and change. Veblen modified the Marxist analysis of machineage society, stressing the key importance of the conflict between "business" (profit-seeking ownership) and "industry" (maximum production of goods and services). He described production as a seamless web of specialized technological processes. The conflict between business and industry arises because, although the "industrial arts" have been developed over centuries by the whole community and are its proper heritage, they have come to be controlled by a few owners, in whose interest it is to restrict output in order to maximize profit. Welfare, to Veblen, meant maximum output at lowest cost—such is the spirit of industry. The spirit of business, on the other hand, he defined as sabotage and salesmanship, "charging what the traffic will bear." It is business management, according to Veblen, that is responsible for depressions. These are inherent in the profit-oriented control of competitive industrial enterprises, because new and more efficient firms (that is, efficient in profit making) force the liquidation of older ones. Moreover, the efforts of profit-oriented business to counteract depressions can only have undesirable consequences. Veblen predicted such consequences as increased mergers, the expansion of salesmanship, and "wasteful" consumption by the government and by the "kept classes." The dominance of business values, said Veblen, extends over many areas of American life, including higher education. His Higher Learning in America (1918) was a searing analysis of the effects of pecuniary canons upon university organization, administration, teaching, and research. In general, however, Veblen's main focus throughout his life was on the development of American social and economic institutions in their international setting. Most of his major works have that sweeping outlook: two on the American economy (1904; 1923); the books on Germany (1915) and on peace (1917); and many of the essays in his collected
306
VEBLEN, THORSTEIN
papers, in The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation and the posthumously published Essays in Our Changing Order. Also in these two volumes are his occasional forays into technical economic theory. But Veblen was much more interested in the social milieu and the consequences of economic factors in modern industrial society than in abstract economic analysis. Perhaps the best short introduction to his leading ideas on social change, business versus industry, nationalism, and other modern developments is the small book called The Vested Interests and the Common Man (1919c). By far the best known of Veblen's work is his first book, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) —the only one that became popular during his lifetime. This treatise is essentially an analysis of the latent functions of "conspicuous consumption" and "conspicuous waste" as symbols of upper-class status and as competitive methods of enhancing individual prestige. Veblen's term "conspicuous consumption" has become part of everyday language. Although most relevant to the gilded age in which he wrote the book, the work is also based on many examples from leisure-class behavior in barbarian and feudal times. Most of the key concepts of Veblen's thought are either present or clearly foreshadowed in The Theory of the Leisure Class —for example, his distinction between industrial and pecuniary pursuits; his concept of evolutionary stages; his definition of certain cultural traits as survivals, with consequent implications for the importance of culture lag; his nostalgic bias for the simple, preindustrial life. Although some of his evolutionary history and anthropology was conjectural and although racial theorizing was a recurrent vein in his earlier works, Veblen's chief method was strikingly modern. He practiced, without so naming it, the analysis of latent or unintended functions of social phenomena. Veblen was never a methodologist; he was always concerned with substantive theories about empirical groups, structures, and processes. That is why commentators see his works both as exposes and as objective expositions. Veblen believed that although business had acquired a dominant position in society since the eighteenth century, in the long run the incompatibility of business and industry would undermine that position. The real threat to profit-oriented business (based on eighteenth-century canons of mutual right) came not from the business cycle but from the impersonal, skeptical, matter-of-fact habits of thought engendered by the twentiethcentury machine process. These would eventually erode the institutions necessary to business, such
as nationalism, religious observance, and private ownership. The very tendency of the machine technology toward ever greater productivity seemed to Veblen increasingly likely to shatter the eighteenth-century institutional bonds that restricted output and bent it to wasteful nationalistic and class ends. What then? Two inconsistent answers were advanced by Veblen. The more optimistic one, which he stressed less, but which occurred more prominently in his earlier work, was that the machine process, through its promise of unlimited abundance for all, might triumph over the obstacles to welfare created by profit-oriented business. The other answer, stressed more heavily, especially in his later writings (and also stressed in Dorfman's classic biography, 1934) was the likelihood of a reversion to predatory, coercive barbarism. In what is perhaps his greatest book, Absentee Ownership (1923), he concluded that the forces of businessas-usual and of national integrity were steadily coalescing "by night and cloud" and that the continued supremacy of business nationalism would probably lead to a renewal of the servile despotism characteristic of earlier epochs. As he grew older, Veblen became increasingly doubtful that the "underlying population" could shake off its conventional faith in "business principles" and nationalism and come through "alive and fit to live." The social consequences in America of World War I only served to confirm Veblen's pessimism. The influence of the Machiavellian press, controlled as it was by vested interests, was being reinforced, he believed, by the influential weight of traditional values and by the unplanned drift of large social forces. "And the common man pays the cost and swells with pride" (1919c, p. 137). Influence. Veblen founded no school. He influenced many scholars and public officials (often former students), but nearly always they differed from him more than they resembled him. Even so, those whose work in some respect touched his constituted a large portion of the intellectual leaders of two generations. Among academic economists may be mentioned such diverse personalities as H. J. Davenport, Joseph Dorfman, and Walter Stewart. W. C. Mitchell, a pioneer in the field of business-cycle history and theory, often acknowledged his indebtedness to Veblen, his onetime teacher at Chicago. (In 1920 Mitchell founded the National Bureau of Economic Research; Stewart later created the Federal Reserve index of industrial production.) In labor economics Robert Hoxie, a former student, and Carleton Parker were both strongly in-
VEBLEN, THORSTEIN fluenced by Veblen. Some writers have grouped Veblen, Mitchell, and J. R. Commons together as "institutional economists," along with Clarence Ayres, Sumner Slichter, and a handful of others. A view of these men as members of a school, however, would be difficult to defend. When the New School for Social Research was founded in 1919, Veblen was one of the "big four" —along with Dewey, Robinson, and Mitchell—who lectured there intermittently for two or three years. Early workers in consumer economics (Hazel Kyrk, Theresa McMahon) owed something to Veblen. A stronger Veblen impress is discernible in the writings of Robert Brady, A. A. Berle, and R. A. Gordon on modern corporate development. At least one minor social movement was a direct heir of certain of Veblen's ideas, although Veblen carefully avoided participation in that enterprise. This was technocracy, a movement founded about 1920 with the aim of maximizing engineering (i.e., productive) efficiency in modern society. Veblen's influence has been less pervasive among sociologists than among economists, although Ogburn developed the concept of culture lag in Social Change in 1922. During the 1930s Veblen's germinal views on waste and lag reached a wide public through the popular books of Stuart Chase. About the same time, several leading legal and academic minds reflected Veblenian themes—especially Thurman Arnold, Felix Frankfurter, and J. Laurence Laughlin. The same can be said of a number of New Deal public administrators— Henry Wallace, R. G. Tugwell, Isador Lubin, and others. Several younger academics, like Max Lerner and David Riesman, have learned from Veblen. In the era after World War n it seems to have been C. Wright Mills who spoke the loudest in Veblen's accents, although Mills was far more outspoken as a social critic than Veblen. While most of the aforementioned persons disagreed with Veblen more often than they agreed with him, all of them had a penchant for a long, broad view of their several fields and for a more or less skeptical attitude toward "establishments." In these respects, rather than in specific thought systems, they were spiritual followers of Veblen. Someone once said that Veblen was the last man who knew everything. His interest ranged over several disciplines and long periods of time. Several writers have compared him to Keynes and Schumpeter. He was one of the few Americans who sensed that victory in World War i might prove to be an adverse turning point in American history. American intervention, wrote Veblen bitterly in 1922, had saved the war system. Indeed,
307
his essays on international relations in the early 1920s are still meaningful for the years following World War n. He remains a source of astonishingly relevant insights, of ironic humor, of saving skepticism, and of a chilling presentiment of the present as tragedy. ARTHUR K. DAVIS [For the historical context of Veblen's work, see ECONOMIC THOUGHT, article on the INSTITUTIONAL SCHOOL; and the biographies of DARWIN; GEORGE; MARX; MORGAN, LEWIS HENRY; SUMNER. For discussion of the subsequent development of Veblen's ideas, see ECONOMY AND SOCIETY; EDUCATION, article on EDUCATIONAL ORGANIZATION; FASHION; MARXIST SOCIOLOGY; and the biographies of COMMONS; DAVENPORT; MILLS; MITCHELL; OGBURN.] WORKS BY VEBLEN (1899) 1953 The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. Rev. ed. New York: New American Library. -> A paperback edition was published in 1959. 1904 The Theory of Business Enterprise. New York: Scribner. 1914 The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts. New York: Macmillan. (1915) 1964 Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution. New York: Kelley. (1917) 1964 An Inquiry Into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of Its Perpetuation. New York: Kelley. (1918) 1957 The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men. New York: Sagamore. (1919a) 1921 The Engineers and the Price System. New York: Huebsch. -» A series of papers reprinted from Dial. A paperback edition was published in 1963 by Harcourt. (1919b) 1961 The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation, and Other Essays. New York: Russell. -> Contains essays first published between 1891 and 1913. (1919c) 1964 The Vested Interests and the Common Man: The Modern Point of View and the New Order. New York: Kelley. -» First published as The Vested Interests and the State of Industrial Art. (1923) 1945 Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Time: The Case of America. New York: Viking. 1925 VEBLEN, THORSTEIN (translator) The Laxdcela Saga. Translated from Icelandic, with an introduction by Thorstein Veblen. New York: Huebsch. Essays in Our Changing Order. Edited by Leon Ardzrooni. New York: Viking, 1934. -» Contains some essays first published between 1892 and 1925 and some previously unpublished. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
DAUGERT, STANLEY M. 1950 The Philosophy of Thorstein Veblen. New York: King's Crown. DAVIS, ARTHUR K. 1957 Thorstein Veblen Reconsidered. Science and Society 21:52-85. DORFMAN, JOSEPH (1934) 1961 Thorstein Veblen and His America. New York: Kelley. DOWD, DOUGLAS F. (editor) 1958 Thorstein Veblen: A Critical Reappraisal. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press.
308
VERBAL ART
-» Contains an extensive bibliography of Veblen's writings. DUFFUS, ROBERT L. 1944 The Innocents at Cedro: A Memoir of Thorstein Veblen and Others. New York: Macmillan. HOBSON, JOHN A. (1936) 1937 Veblen. New York: Wiley. HOMAN, FAULT. 1928 Contemporary Economic Thought. New York: Harper. -» See especially Chapter 2. INNIS, H. A. 1956 Essays in Canadian Economic History. Univ. of Toronto Press. -> See especially pages 17-26. Institutional Economics; Veblen, Commons, and Mitchell Reconsidered: A Series of Lectures. 1963 Berkeley: Univ. of California Press. -» By Joseph Dorfman, C. E. Ay res, and others. JOHNSON, ALVIN 1935 Veblen, Thorstein Bunde. Volume 15, pages 234-235 in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences. New York: Macmillan. PARRINGTON, VERNON L. 1930 Main Currents in American Thought: An Interpretation of American Literature From the Beginnings to 1920. Volume 3: The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America, 1860-1920. New York: Harcourt. RIESMAN, DAVID 1953 Thorstein Veblen: A Critical Interpretation. New York: Scribner. ROLL, ERICH (1938) 1963 A History of Economic Thought. 3d ed., rev. & enl. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. -> See especially pages 439-454, "Veblen." Thorstein Bunde Veblen, 1857-1957. 1957 Monthly Review 9:65-122.
VERBAL ART See FOLKLORE. VERSTEHEN The. idea of Verstehen (German for "understanding," "comprehension") has come to denote a form of conceptual activity held by some theorists to be peculiar to the social sciences and humanities in contrast to Wissen ("knowing," "acquaintance"), which is conceived as denoting a form of conceptual activity peculiar to the physical sciences. Numerous methodological and theoretical controversies have raged in the social sciences since the late nineteenth century over these dialectically conceived and contrasting modes of thought. These controversies reached a high point in the period immediately before World War i, at the time sociology was being converted into an academic discipline. They have been endemic to the social sciences ever since. Positivism and antipositivism. The lines of controversy have formed between those who do and those who do not draw a distinction in principle between two presumed alternative modes of thought present in the physical and social sciences. Theorists rejecting any fundamental distinction are usually called positivists; they assume that the
same methods which have proved their unparalleled value in the analysis of the physical world are applicable to the materials of the social sciences, and that while these methods may have to be adapted to a special subject matter, the logic of explanation in the physical and social sciences is identical. Theorists who draw the distinction between Verstehen and Wissen can be labeled antipositivistic. The critical element in antipositivism is the insistence that the methods of the physical sciences, however modified, are intrinsically inadequate to the subject matter of the social sciences: in the physical sciences man's knowledge is external, experimental, and quantitative, while the social sciences are concerned with man's experience. In accord with their distinction between experience, which is understood from within, and the world of objects, which is known from without, the antipositivists have drawn a series of methodological contrasts between the social and physical sciences. The world of experience, including the social world, is conceived as presented by direct intuition; the world of physical objects is conceived as apprehended by sensuous observation. Thus introspection is the normal procedure of sciences dealing with experience, just as experiment is the natural procedure of sciences dealing with physical objects. Generalization is also conceived by the antipositivists as assuming a different character in physical and social science. The physical scientist, they believe, seeks by means of repeated experiments to obtain measurable data: statistical regularities and mathematically formulated laws are the forms taken by general knowledge in the physical sciences. The social scientist, on the other hand, is seen as elaborating an idea on the basis of careful introspection: he makes the leap to the experience of other persons by empathic interpretations based on his direct intuitive experience. In the end the most significant of social science "understandings" remain qualitative rather than quantitative. Positivism is basically opposed to all these distinctions and contrasts. The consistent positivist either wipes them away as mere distinctions without a difference or, at best, admits them as mere differences of degree or emphasis. In the course of continuing social science research, according to the positivist, experimental, quantitative, and mathematical knowledge is gradually approximated, if not attained. Mind and body The controversy between positivists and antipositivists is deeply rooted in Western thought.
VERSTEHEN Accordingly, there is a strong likelihood that it will continue. The protean forms it has taken can be traced to various historical incidents in the rise of the social sciences. In its most elemental sense the doctrine of Verstehen rests on a presumed intrinsic difference between mind and all that is nonmind. The Verstehen controversy in the social sciences is thus a continuation of the debate over the mind-matter distinction—a debate that, in the West, is already over two thousand years old. The distinction between the mental world of ideal objects and the world of physical things, while unknown to the first school of Ionian philosophers, was gradually elevated to a central position in ancient Greek philosophy. By the time of Socrates and Plato extensive epistemological considerations (including the problem of universal knowledge) were ordered in terms of the distinction. Plato and his followers considered knowledge of ideal objects to be of a higher order of perfection than knowledge of physical things. In the course of the Hellenization of Christianity these ancient mind-matter distinctions were taken over by the theologians. With the elaboration of Christian dogma in the European Middle Ages the distinction between mind and matter was assimilated to that between spirit and flesh, sacred and profane. The ancient problem of universals was also revived, giving rise to the realism-nominalism controversy of the Dominicans and Franciscans. Modern philosophy, which dates from Descartes, did not by any means eliminate the mind-matter problem. Descartes proclaimed a new program for establishing the rational unity of human thought in all major spheres: empirical, theological, and ethical. Beginning with the concept of the thinking individual (Cogito ergo sum) as the one unquestioned first premise, Descartes sought by a chain of logical deductions to prove all other ideas, including the idea of God, with the certainty of a mathematical demonstration. Even in the works of Descartes the enterprise of achieving a rationally unified body of thought encountered obstacles in the notion of mind and matter as two distinct substances. Mind and matter presumably met in the individual, where they had influence upon one another. But where did such interaction occur? And how did mind influence the body without itself acting like matter, and vice versa? Descartes assigned this interaction to the pineal gland, which had been described but not functionally explained by the physiologists of his day. He also posited the existence of "animal spirits" that transmitted the mutual influence of mind and body—a theoretical expedient that resembles the positing of a substance called ether
309
to support the wave theory of electromagnetic phenomena. The functions Descartes assigned to the pineal gland and animal spirits were so obviously ad hoc inventions that they failed even to convince his contemporaries. A school of philosophers called the occasionalists attempted to solve his problem by postulating that mind and matter did not really interact at all, but developed as synchronized events, much like preset clocks, so that when the mind was in a given state the body was in a corresponding state—as if the two were in interaction. The occasionalists were not very convincing either, but they did succeed in finding a function for God in a world that was coming to seem increasingly mechanized: He preset mind and matter on their respective courses. It is unnecessary to rehearse here the story of the first wave of modern Western philosophical development from Descartes to Kant except to observe that this development represents, above all, a series of attempts to develop a rationally unified system of human thought while at the same time preserving the concept of mind and matter as intrinsically different universal substances. The last and most dramatic failure of this enterprise was the skepticism of Hume; the last and most dramatic attempt to salvage the whole philosophical program was Kant's monumental synthesis. Kant presented three spheres in which universal judgments are possible: the world of science (that is, the study of empirical events), ethics and the world of the self, and the world of religion. The capacity to make universal judgments he took to be the essence of rationality. But—to avoid those conflicts which had brought down earlier formulations—Kant asserted that various contradictions are inevitable if one transfers judgments appropriate to one sphere (such as the empirical world) to another (such as that of morality). The world of empirical things, he contended, is ordered by the principle of mechanical causality; the world of morality by the principle of freedom. Each principle produces contradictions if transplanted to the sphere of the other. If one asks of the great Kantian synthesis how these spheres are supposed to interact, one quickly sees that, in the last analysis, they do not; Kantianism is only another form of occasionalism. However, Kant did his work so thoroughly that it became the natural starting point for most developments in Western philosophy since his time. While the philosophers were wrestling with the mind-body problem, various other scholars, researchers, and scientists were pursuing special areas that could ultimately be classified as belong-
3 10
VERSTEHEN
ing primarily to the sphere of mind or to that of matter. The study of various categories of culture (literature, art, music) belonged to mind; the study of the celestial bodies, the physical and chemical properties of things, or the earth's surface belonged to matter. The study of human history was concerned with man's experience and belonged to mind; the study of human physiology to matter. Sometimes these spheres tended to come together and a discipline sought to bridge the two spheres, but usually the special area belonged unmistakably to the humanities or to the physical sciences. A given discipline would elaborate whatever methods of study yielded dependable results and would pay little attention to the methods of other fields except to borrow an occasional promising procedure. Thus a considerable number of special fields were gradually established inside and outside the universities. By virtue of their very specialization most of the scholars in these special fields were able to ignore the mind-body problem. Only when a given theorist sought to generalize more widely and relate his specialty to others might he encounter it. Rise of the social sciences The changed social and intellectual situation of the nineteenth century ensured the migration of the mind-body problem outside the circles of philosophers. The modern national complexes were consolidated; the twin movements toward mass democracy and socialism were launched. The universities were reoriented to national requirements. Since science was playing an unparalleled role in the consolidation of the nation-state .and the rise of the new capitalistic economies, the academically based sciences mounted in prestige compared to other disciplines. The time was ripe for a major and sustained invasion of scientific perspectives into areas formerly reserved to the humanities. A primary cultural consequence of the changed intellectual milieu of the nineteenth-century Western world was the rise of the social sciences. In rapid succession anthropology, economics, geography, jurisprudence, political science, psychology, and sociology made their appearance. All of them developed in spheres originally reserved to the humanities. For the most part the materials out of which they were formed were originally historical or anecdotal. The methods by which their subject matter was first studied were philological, historical, and introspective. Thus the formation of the social sciences could not have taken place without a powerful impetus toward positivism. In fact Auguste Comte, often
noted as the founder of sociology, was also the author of the term "positivism." In proposing to extend methods that had proved their effectiveness in dealing with the physical world to social subject matter (the world of mind), Comte automatically laid the foundation for a new series of controversies on the mind—matter problem. Since the social sciences had arisen in territories formerly divided between the humanities and physical sciences, they became the primary scene of contests that could no longer be confined to philosophical circles. Positivism as sponsored by Comte in France and by Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill in England proposed to analyze human events purely in terms of what is empirically presented. It radically rejected all concepts of eternal ideas, transcendent principles, or hidden essences at the heart of social events and held that the proper methodology for the study of society is to be found in the physical science concepts of succession, coexistence, and cause and effect. These concepts, the positivists maintained, enable scientists to establish the laws of social evolution, of climatic influence, and of social organization. Thus Mill (1843) proposed to found sociology on a scientific psychology deduced from physiology and implemented by the extension and generalization of the procedures of physical science. The positivistic orientation in social science was calculated to arouse anxieties in traditional humanists, for they suddenly discovered that various psychological, social, and cultural phenomena were being treated, in the words of Durkheim (1895), "as things." Moreover, the worst fears of the traditional humanists were apparently confirmed when the abrupt transplanting of physical science perspectives into fields for which they had not been designed resulted in numerous crudities and vulgarisms. The positivists brushed aside long-established subtleties and insights associated with humanistic analysis. Finally, the procedures of the positivists were still largely untested, and led to contradictory constructions of the same evidence. Positivistic social science borrowed its theoretical perspectives from philosophy, its methods from physical science, and its empirical material from history. The various crudities and, at times, outright contradictions it produced suggested the necessity either of abandoning the social sciences or radically modifying them. The rise of the social sciences accorded with the needs of the time, and it was out of the question to abandon them. Instead, as might have been expected, there began a serious review of the philosophic origins of social
VERSTEHEN science, the methods it tried to take from the physical sciences, and the legitimacy of its employment of materials from history. Neo-idealism and Nee-Kantianism Positivistic social science traced its philosophic origins to Francis Bacon, to the British empiricists, particularly David Hume, and to the utilitarians. The two best-organized systems of antipositivism were the neo-idealistic (tracing its philosophic origins to Hegel, Schleiermacher, and other idealists) and the Neo-Kantian. Adherents of both positions have questioned the positivistic reliance on history and application of the methods of physical science to historical materials. The two most famous representatives of neo-idealism and Neo-Kantianism in the social and cultural sciences were Wilhelm Dilthey and Heinrich Rickert. They drew their distinctions in somewhat different ways. Dilthey followed the lead of Johann Gustav Droysen, professor of history at the University of Berlin, in drawing a sharp distinction between the subject matter of the physical and the human sciences. The peculiarity of the latter was that they were concerned with the ever-changing living processes of human experience. The essential character of life, moreover, was to be found in the meanings it sustains or, perhaps better, strove to realize. These were directly given in one's own experience and empathically understood in the experience of others. Full understanding, however, required reliving. The meanings of life as it moved toward intelligent synthesis were never complete. Hence one most fully grasped the life process by means of ideal types representing unrealized end points in the movement of life toward perfection. [See the biography of DILTHEY.] Rickert, in accord with Kant and the Neo-Kantians of the Marburg school, stressed the contrast between a priori form and content in a manner different from Dilthey, who thought rather in terms of ever-changing process. Moreover, Rickert rejected Dilthey's distinction between the human and the natural sciences; science, he thought, is the study of phenomena, whether social or physical. The positivists had proposed to use history as the content and physical science as the methodological procedure of social science. In contrast, Rickert saw history and science as two distinct ways in which nature might be conceived. Science dealt with recurrent relations, history with particulars. They were nomothetic and idiographic disciplines, respectively. As an idiographic discipline, history consisted of judgments of significance, of discovering the unique character of an
311
event which provided its identity. Judgments of unique significance in turn involved locating a historical individual within a more comprehensive whole. Science generalized by simplifying. The comprehensive individualizing concepts of history, on the other hand, comprised ever more heterogeneous complexes of historically significant objects. It is evident that both neo-idealism and NeoKantianism rested on the mind-matter dichotomy. Both resisted positivism as a reduction of mind to nature. Both attempted to restore mind to what was conceived as its rightful place as subject matter for the sciences of experience. Neo-idealism sought to accomplish this by distinguishing between types of subject matter, Neo-Kantianism by specifying a set of methodological distinctions. The method of Verstehen therefore had somewhat different implications for each. For the neo-idealists Verstehen was an act of thought that moved from the immediate grasp of meanings in one's own experience, through empathic understanding of others and the process of reliving as implemented by type concepts, to a generalized understanding of the experience of mankind. For Neo-Kantian social scientists, on the other hand, Verstehen consisted of isolating formal categories of value that permit the subsumption of historical individuals and of the significant changes to which they are subject under progressively more complex heterogeneous wholes. Recent trends Ever since the beginnings of sociology it has been possible to distinguish between positivists and antipositivists by noting whether they reject or accept the method of Verstehen. The founders of sociology—Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, and Lester Ward—were more or less pure positivists. Antipositivism with a Verstehen orientation appears in the works of Georg Simmel and Alfred Vierkandt. Emile Durkheim continued the positivistic tradition; Max Weber, though more of a positivist than either, was strongly influenced by Dilthey's method of "understanding" and Rickert's "ascertainment" of historical significance. These influences appear particularly in Weber's methodological discussions. In American sociology, Verstehen orientations appear—to choose only a few major examples—in the works of Charles Horton Cooley (1894-1929), Florian Znaniecki (1934), Robert Maclver (1942), and Pitirim Sorokin (1937-1941). Talcott Parsons' first major work, The Structure of Social Action (1937), was strongly antipositivistic in orientation
31 2
VERSTEHEN
and deeply influenced by the Verstehen point of view. During the same period the works of George Lundberg expressed a relatively radical positivism. Theodore Abel (1948) developed a sophisticated positivism in the course of a careful critique of the claims of Verstehen to special methodological significance. In the period following World War n, C. Wright Mills (1959) denounced physical science as a false and pretentious Messiah and argued for a concept of social science somewhat similar to that of the Neo-Kantians. Werner Stark (1958) has made a Verstehen orientation and a revised Neo-Kantianism central to his studies in the sociology of knowledge. The emergence of a group of young sociologists describing themselves as exponents of a "new sociology" following the example of C. Wright Mills, of an existentialist impulse in sociology, and of a sociological coterie, reminiscent of the NeoKantians, interested in thrusting the problem of value judgment into central focus and whose adherents call themselves humanistic sociologists, shows that the mind-matter problem continues to be critical for mid-century sociology and that the Verstehen orientation is still sociologically relevant. One may surmise that the problems in social science generally identified with the notion of Verstehen will continue to arise as long as the mind-matter distinction persists in the West. The recurrent controversy will not be eliminated merely by a choice between positivism and one or another variety of antipositivism, for most of the positivists have retained the mind-matter distinction and propose only to reduce the problems of mind to those of matter. When this is done the Verstehen point of view is only suppressed for a time, emerging once again as soon as one attempts to account for those properties identified with mind. In the course of the conceptual turmoil of the present world there has been some attempt to cut beneath the mind-matter distinctions present in Western thought from the time of classical Greece and return to the pre-Socratics for a new set of suppositions. Perhaps one outcome of this enterprise will be to do away with these distinctions and the recurrent methodological problems associated with them. In that case a form of social science would be established that could no longer be classified as positivistic or antipositivistic. DON MARTINDALE [Directly related are the entries HISTORY, article on THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY; INTERACTION, article OH SOCIAL INTERACTION; KNOWLEDGE, SOCIOLOGY
OF; POSITIVISM. Other relevant material may be found in PHENOMENOLOGY; SOCIOLOGY, article on THE FIELD; UTILITARIANISM; and in the biographies Of BACON; COMTE; CoOLEY; DESCARTES; DlLTHEY;
DURKHEIM; HUME; KANT; LUNDBERG; MAcIVER; MILL; MILLS; PLATO; SIMMEL; SOROKIN; SPENCER; WARD; WERER, MAX; ZNANIECKL] BIBLIOGRAPHY ABEL, THEODORE (1948)1953 The Operation Called Verstehen. Pages 677-687 in Herbert Feigl and May Brodbeck (editors), Readings in the Philosophy of Science. New York: Appleton. ARON, RAYMOND (1938) 1961 Introduction to the Philosophy of History: An Essay on the Limits of Historical Objectivity. Boston: Beacon. -> First published in French. BERGER, PETER L. 1963 Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. BUHLER, KARL (1926) 1929 Die Kriese der Psychologic. Jena (Germany): Fischer. -» First published in KantStudien, Volume 31, pages 455-526. COMTE, AUGUSTE (1830-1842) 1877 Cours de philosophie positive. 4th ed. 6 vols. Paris: Bailliere. COOLEY, CHARLES H. (1894-1929) 1930 Sociological Theory and Social Research, Eeing the Selected Papers of Charles Horton Cooley. With an introduction and notes by Robert Cooley Angell. New York: Holt. DILTHEY, WILHELM Gesammelte Schriften. 12 vols. Leipzig: Teubner, 1914-1958. DURKHEIM, EMILE (1895) 1958 The Rules of Sociological Method. 8th ed. Edited by George E. G. Catlin. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. -> First published as Les regies de la methode sociologique. ERISMANN, THEODOR 1924 Die Eigenart des Geistigen. Leipzig: Quelle. HODGES, HERBERT A. 1952 The Philosophy of Wilhelm Dilthey. London: Routledge. HOROWITZ, IRVING L. (editor) 1964 The New Sociology: Essays in Social Science and Social Theory, in Honor of C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. HUGHES, HENRY STUART 1958 Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890-1930. New York: Knopf. JASPERS, KARL (1913) 1963 General Psychopathology. Univ. of Chicago Press. -> First published in German. KLUBACK, WILLIAM 1956 Wilhelm Dilthey's Philosophy of History. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. MACIVER, ROBERT M. 1942 Social Causation. Boston: Ginn. ~» A paperback edition was published in 1964 by Harper. MILL, JOHN STUART (1843) 1961 A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive: Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation. London: Longmans. MILLS, C. WRIGHT 1959 The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. PARSONS, TALCOTT (1937) 1949 The Structure of Social Action: A Study in Social Theory With Special Reference to a Group of Recent European Writers. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. RICKERT, HEINRICH (1902) 1929 Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen B e griff sbildung. 5th ed. Tubingen (Germany): Mohr. ROTHACKER, ERICH (1926) 1947 Logik und Systematik der Geisteswissenschaften. Bonn: Bouvier. -» First published in the Handbuch der Philosophic.
VICO, GIOVANNI BATTISTA SOROKIN, PITIRIM A. (1937-1941)1962 Social and Cultural Dynamics. 4 vols. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Bedminster Press. -> Volume 1: Fluctuation of Forms of Art. Volume 2: Fluctuation of Systems of Truth, Ethics, and Law. Volume 3: Fluctuation of Social Relationships, War, and Revolution. Volume 4: Basic Problems, Principles, and Methods. SPRANGER, EDUARD (1914) 1928 Types of Men: The Psychology and Ethics of Personality. 5th ed. Halle (Germany): Niemeyer. -» First published as Lebensformen: Geisteswissenschaftliche Psychologic und Ethik der Personlichkeit. STARK, WERNER 1958 The Sociology of Knowledge: An Essay in Aid of a Deeper Understanding of the History of Ideas. London: Routledge; Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. STEIN, MAURICE; and VIDICH, ARTHUR (editors) 1963 Sociology on Trial. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: PrenticeHall. WEBER, MAX (1904-1917) 1951 Gesammelte Aufsdtze zur Wissenschaftslehre. 2d ed., rev. & enl. Tubingen (Germany): Mohr. ZNANIECKI, FLORIAN 1934 The Method of Sociology. New York: Farrar & Rinehart.
VICO, GIOVANNI BATTISTA Giovanni Battista Vico, Italian jurist, philologist, and philosopher, was born in Naples in 1668 and died there in 1744. His contribution to European thought may be characterized as an attempt to combine Enlightenment ideas of natural law and Renaissance literary theory within a comprehensive theory of myth as the basis for a new conception of social dynamics. He is best known for his philosophy of history, set forth in The New Science (1725). Vico, the son of a poor bookseller, was largely self-educated. He held the chair of Latin eloquence (rhetoric) at the University of Naples from 1699 to 1741. He had originally been interested in jurisprudence, on which he wrote a number of works; but when he failed to win the competition for the chair of civil law in 1723, he turned to the study of history and to the articulation of his so-called New Science, which occupied him up to the time of his death. In 1735 Vico was appointed royal historiographer to the Neapolitan house of Bourbon, but this was a belated and niggardly reward for a life that had combined consistent dedication to learning with unrelieved poverty, marital tragedy, public indifference to his work, and betrayal by a succession of patrons. Vice's prime intellectual enemy was Descartes. He objected to Descartes's belief that man was everywhere, always, and equally rational. In his view, rationality was a historical acquisition, not a constant component of human nature. Vice's secondary target was the natural-law tradition as
31 3
represented by Selden and Pufendorf. The thinkers upon whom he drew for inspiration most often were Plato, Tacitus, and, among the moderns, Grotius and Francis Bacon. In the Neiv Science Vico tried to combine Plato's notion of the relation between sense data and ideas, Tacitus' insight into historical process, and the inductive method advocated by Bacon in the Novum organum. But Vico was no mere eclectic; the New Science was a highly original synthesis of the various philosophical creeds and scholarly disciplines of his own time, a synthesis which took into account the materialism of a Hobbes and the idealism of a Descartes, but which framed them in a new approach to history, conceived as the study of human consciousness as it has evolved in time and space. The New Science—main principles. The main arguments of the New Science can be discussed in terms of a question and three assumptions. The question is, How does it come about that men, who are basically ferine, selfish, and vicious (as Machiavelli and Hobbes argued), are able to form communities, to submit themselves to the rule of law, and to serve the well-being not only of themselves but of others too? According to Vico, none of the received intellectual traditions could solve this problem. Classical philosophy could not even conceive of it, because it denied the fact of change. Modern philosophers posed it, but then went on to solve it by holding that ancient man was just as rational as modern man and formed human society in much the way that modern men form a commercial concern or corporation. Christian theology begged the question by appealing to divine intervention to explain the formation of human communities out of the primitive animal nature. Even if Christian theologians were right about the way in which the ancient Hebrews had been formed into communities, there remained, Vico noted, the problem of explaining how the "gentile" nations were able to raise themselves above the animal level without the direct aid of the one, true God. And it is to this question that Vice's work addresses itself. This brings us to the three assumptions that underlie Vico's New Science: that cultural artifacts are creations of human consciousness, nothing more and nothing less; that a human mind in the past operated in the same way that a present one does; and that men are capable of understanding human phenomena in ways that are not possible with respect to natural phenomena. Hence Vico's methodological principle—one can understand only what one has created or is in principle capable of creating. In effect this means that since God,
31 4
VICO, GIOVANNI BATTISTA
not man, is the creator of the natural world, then only God, and not man, can understand it fully. Since man is a part of nature, he can, to be sure, understand nature in part. But there will always be something in nature that he cannot comprehend fully; there will always be something mysterious about nature for everyone but its creator. It follows, therefore, that the Enlightenment was altogether misguided in its attempt to construct a science of human nature on the basis of a study of physical nature: understanding cultural phenomena, which are creations of men alone, in terms of incompletely understood natural principles is doomed from the start. Man can understand himself and everything he himself has created, i.e., the whole realm of human culture; but he can do so only on the basis of an inductive study of culture, not by proceeding from the study of nature. Thus, according to Vico, the proper basis for a science of culture and a metaphysics of mind can be found only in a historical investigation of the encounters between human consciousness and nature as they occur in different parts of the world at different times and in different situations. However, if past human consciousness is understandable by present human consciousness, it must not be thought that past problems were the same as present ones or that the specific responses of men to those past problems were similar to what present responses to those problems would be. Quite the contrary—and here is the core of Vice's historicism—each age has its own problems, and its responses to those problems will vary according to the level of rationality achieved by the culture in question. Cultural change is a macrocosm of the changes that occur microcosmically in the individual human being as he passes from birth to maturity: each age has its own needs, capabilities, and preconceptions; and each age calls forth the institutions and values necessary for it to deal with the world as it conceives of it. In order for modern man to understand primitive man, then, it is necessary for the modern to enter sympathetically into a world in which nature seemed alive and governed by hostile spirits whose power over man was exceeded only by their malignity. A proper understanding of human consciousness requires that we return to the time when humanity was a child, when men lived and acted like animals, and then show how the very nature of nature itself set up a process of development that lifted man out of his natural brutality, in spite of his own egoistic impulses, and set him on the road to civilization. Vico's social theory. If primitive man is as ignorant of the nature of nature and is as irrational
in his responses to nature as a child is, then it follows, according to Vico, that human society resulted not from abstract considerations of utility or from rational self-interest, as Hobbes believed, but, rather, from immediate responses to real or imagined physical threats. The basic unit of society, the family, was formed when primitive man was frightened by such natural occurrences as thunder or lightning, took refuge in caves with his women, and grew used to living in groups. A similar fear lay at the base of primitive religious belief. Since men translate the unfamiliar into terms of the familiar, the processes of nature are at first experienced as anthropomorphic spirits that must be propitiated and placated, an activity that falls to the heads of families. Thus was born the "age of the gods," the time when men lived in patriarchal communities (familii), bound together by blood ties alone and ruled over by strong men who combined the roles of priest and king. These primal communities were expanded when fugitives from the original ferine competition sought protection by the patriarchs in return for their labor. The first truly social classes appeared at this point, for the refugees (socii'} were not linked by blood to the primal kinship groups but were affiliated only by services rendered and received. The division of power and privileges thus established on functional lines generated tensions within the primal group, and the socii soon began to demand fuller participation in the benefits of the group to which they contributed their labor. This required that the patriarchs of the various tribes come together to protect themselves from the socii. Here, according to Vico, is the origin of aristocratic societies In such societies the ruling group claimed descent from the gods; it was characterized by punctilious adherence to codes of honor and achievement; and its dominant style of life was perpetuated by a specific kind of poetry, the heroic epic. Thus, the "age of the gods" gave way to "the age of heroes," the age of religion to that of poetry, and the rule of priest-kings to that of nobles— this succession being a result of the demands of power relationships and the pursuit of individual privilege. The very success of each ruling group in each age bred the conditions for its overthrow. The security and order established by the aristocrats resulted in the enrichment of the plebeians: the latter grew stronger and rebelled, and then justified rebellion by appeals both to their contribution to the general welfare of the community and to the humanity that they shared with the nobility. The struggle between aristocrats and plebeians resulted in the transition from the age of heroes to the age
VICO, GIOVANNI BATTISTA of peoples, from the language of poetry to that of prose, and from a customary code of conduct to legal systems in which the written contract came to define relations between parties enjoying definable rights and specific privileges in the commonwealth. Only then was monarchy possible, for monarchy was imaginable, for Vico, only as rule by one in the interests of an internally differentiated social whole. Such is the basic pattern of the corso, or cycle, which, according to Vico, all nations follow in their development from primitivism to civilization. He did not rule out the possibility of cultural borrowing, but he insisted that cultures which have embarked upon their corsi will borrow only those ideas, institutions, and values which conform to their needs at the particular stage at which they have arrived by an inherent logic of evolution. Of course, it is possible for nations to become "arrested" in their development, or even annihilated, if they come into conflict with other cultures at more advanced stages of growth. But on the whole, cultures develop in response to needs and desires peculiar to them at specific times in their cycles. All of this points to the relationship between human needs, on the one hand, and institutional forms and modes of expression, on the other. It provides a critical tool for the historian, allowing him to penetrate the opaque language of myth and legend. And it suggests that religious, poetic, and even philosophical systems must be viewed primarily as rationalizations of achieved social relationships. As Vico put it, "The order of ideas must follow the order of institutions." This is the essence of the New Science. Vico employed this insight with special subtlety to criticize contemporary thought about the nature of Homeric poetry and of Roman law. Idea of history. Although Vico shared the Enlightenment belief in the providential nature of history, he rejected the idea that humanity as a whole developed inevitably in linear sequence from lower to higher forms of self-consciousness and rationality. In most cultures, he held, each stage is an improvement over the preceding one, but every third stage (the philosophical, or scientific, stage), which follows the religious and heroic stages, is always followed by a period of decline, a time of barbarism rendered more barbarous by the refinements on savagery that sophistication provides— in other words, true decadence. Thus, for Vico, providence seems to operate only within cultures (rather than across cultures) to turn private selfseeking to public good—and only for a while. In the end, providence is assimilated into human consciousness and thus becomes identical with the
315
activities of a humanity liberated from all fear of nature and God by the New Science. Private selfseeking then predominates, in the form of mere pursuit of pleasure, and results in a breakdown of civic responsibility and therewith the disintegration of culture. Vico did not rule out the possibility of a greater, macrocosmic providence operating across cultures as well, that providence revealed by the Christian religion which allows Western man to experience the cyclical recurrence of the cultural process in an ultimately progressive way. For example, the "second barbarism" of the early Middle Ages constituted a positive advance over the "first barbarism" of the Homeric age and the barbarism of preRoman Italy. And Vico saw the expansion of Western civilization over the globe as an anticipation of a new humanity, unifying peoples hitherto separated and imprisoned within their specific cyclical patterns of rise and fall. In short, human history in general does not develop in either a linear or a cyclical pattern, but more like a spiral, consisting, as it were, of a motion in which every two steps forward is paid for by one step backward; this conception is similar to the dialectical pattern envisaged by Hegel and Marx a century later. And, like Hegel and Marx, Vico seems to have regarded his own philosophical activity as evidence that mankind was at last entering into its kingdom here on earth. The New Science is both evidence of the birth of a new historical consciousness and the instrument by which humanity is to be liberated from cyclical determinism. It is liberating in that it shows man not as the product of fate or of physical process alone or of divine will alone, but as free creator of his own destiny. Just as Christianity is the one true religion for all men everywhere, so the New Science is the one true philosophy for all men everywhere. And just as Christianity had freed man from servitude to an imagined hostile nature by divesting that nature of all spirits, so the New Science will free man from servitude to religion itself, not by destroying religion but by revealing it for what it really is, i.e., man's vision of what he might become. In the New Science men are revealed as creators of their own humanity, are liberated from myth, and are charged to undertake creation of themselves selfconsciously and positively. Vice's influence. Vice's philosophy was not very influential during the eighteenth century, but it did prefigure many of the ideas that later appeared in romanticism. Therefore, Vico became fully appreciated only in the nineteenth century, largely as a result of Michelet's popularization of his work. Vice's influence on nineteenth-century social and
31 6
VIDAL DE LA BLACHE, PAUL
literary theory was profound: Goethe, Mazzini, Coleridge, Thomas Arnold, Taine, Marx, and En gels all admitted debts to him. In the present century his influence has been even greater, encompassing thinkers and writers as diverse as Croce, Gentile, and Collingwood in philosophy; Joyce and Yeats in literature; Toynbee and Trotsky in historiography; Pareto, Sorel, and Sorokin in social science; and Edmund Wilson and Erich Auerbach in literary criticism. It is only in the present century that Vice's highly original Autobiography, first published in 1728 and reissued with an addition in 1731, has been fully appreciated. Here Vico applied the principles of the New Science to the analysis of his own intellectual evolution, thus providing, or so he believed, a confirmation on the ontogenetic level of the phylogenetic pattern of human evolution. HAYDEN V. WHITE [For the historical context of Vico's work, see HISTORY, article on THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY; and the biographies of BACON; DESCARTES; GROTIUS; HOBBES; PLATO. For discussion of the subsequent development of his ideas, see SOCIOLOGY, article on THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIOLOGICAL THOUGHT;
and
the biographies of CROCE; PARETO; SOREL; SOROKIN; TROTSKY.] WORKS BY VICO (1725) 1948 The New Science. Translated by Thomas G. Bergin and Max H. Fisch. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press. -> First published in Italian. A paperback edition was published in 1961 by Doubleday. (1728-1729) 1944 The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico. Translated by Max H. Fisch and Thomas G. Bergin. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press. -» First published in Italian. Opere. Edited by Fausto Nicolini. 8 vols. Bari: Laterza, 1911-1941. Opere. Edited by Fausto Nicolini. Milan: Ricciardi, 1953. -» A one-volume selection. Opere. Edited by Paolo Rossi. Milan: Rizzoli, 1959. II! pensiero di Giambattista Vico. Edited by Paolo Rossi. Turin: Loescher, 1959. Tutte le opere. Edited by Francesco Flora. Vols. 1—. Milan: Mondadori, 1957—. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
ADAMS, HENRY P. 1935 Life and Writings of Giambattista Vico. London: Allen & Unwin. AMERIO, FRANCO 1947 Introduzione allo studio di Giambattista Vico. Turin: Societa Editrice Italiana. CAPONIGRI, A. ROBERT 1953 Time and Idea: The Theory of History in G. B. Vico. Chicago: Regnery. CHAIX-RUY, JULES 1943 La formation de la pensee philosophique de G. B. Vico. Gap (France): Jean. CIARDO, MANLIO 1947 Le quattro epoche dello storicismo: Vico, Kant, Hegel, Croce. Bari: Laterza. CORSANO, ANTONIO 1956 Giambattista Vico. Bari: Laterza.
CROCK, BENEDETTO (1911) 1964 The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico. Translated by R. G. Collingwood. New York: Russell. -> First published in Italian. CROCK, BENEDETTO 1947-1948 Bibliografia vichiana. 2 vols. Revised and enlarged by Fausto Nicolini. Naples: Ricciardi. NICOLINI, FAUSTO 1949-1950 Commento storico alia seconda Scienza nuova. 2 vols. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura.
VIDAL DE LA BLACHE, PAUL Paul Vidal de la Blache (1845-1918) was one of the most important pioneers of modern geography. It was he who created a place for human geography among the sciences of man and became the leader of the French school of geography. He was not, however, predisposed to the building of systems; indeed, the components of his conception of geography are scattered in journal articles, in several books, in the preface to an atlas, and in a posthumous, incomplete work. His name remains connected with the Annales de geographic, which he founded, and with the multivolume Geographic universelle (1927-1948), which he had planned before his death and for which he had chosen the contributors. (After Vidal died, Lucien Gallois, who had participated with him in the planning of the work, assumed responsibility for its execution.) It was through his teaching and through his disciples, at least as much as through his written work, that Vidal exerted his influence. Vidal initially acquired a scholarly reputation as a historian of antiquity, and as such he visited Rome and Athens; these visits undoubtedly influenced his later work as a geographer in that they revealed to him the richness and complexity of landscapes that had been radically changed by human actions. At the time that he was still primarily a historian, he was attracted by the then recent books of certain German geographers, naturalists, botanists, and geologists, including works by the Humboldts, Ratzel, and Haeckel. From them he acquired the sense of a close link between human societies and their natural milieus. Vidal was concerned that geographers be trained in geology; he also emphasized the necessity of considering the major bioclimatic zones and the importance of ecology for geography. Since Vidal added these insights gradually to his basically historical outlook, his ideas underwent progressive elaboration, revision, and refinement. In the Preface to his Atlas (1894), Vidal asserted that "considered in isolation, the features that go to make up the physiognomy of the countryside are significant as facts; only when they are related
VIDAL DE LA BLACHE, PAUL to the chain of events of which they are a part do they become significant as scientific ideas." Each fact in isolation depends on a specialized discipline, but the totality of facts, which makes up the characteristics of a landscape, is the geographer's field of interest par excellence. Vidal urged that it is necessary to "go even further and to recognize that no single part of the earth has significance in and of itself" and, therefore, to find in a sequence of events "a manifestation of the general laws of the terrestrial organism." It was in such elegant phrases that Vidal defined the scope of both regional and general geography. At the time that Vidal wrote the Preface to the Atlas, he still attributed primary importance to the physical elements of the landscape. Later he sought also to demonstrate the role of man as a geographical factor and the perpetual play of action, reaction, and interaction between human groups and their natural milieus. Wherever there are, or have been, human societies, the landscape is not merely the product of a sequence of natural events but is also the work of men. Each successive group inhabiting a particular region has left its mark there, thus bequeathing to its successors new conditions of existence. Each group, with its particular habits, techniques, and social, economic, and psychological structures, deals in its own way with the problems set by the milieu. Perhaps the key phrase in Vidal's work is "Whatever concerns man is marked by contingency" ("Tout ce qui touche 1'homme est frappe de contingence"). If this statement is characteristic of Western thought in general at the beginning of the twentieth century, it must nevertheless not be forgotten how new such ideas were in Vidal's time. It meant breaking with the excessive determinism of the nineteenth century, putting knowledge of human societies on a level with knowledge of natural milieus, and asserting that the social facts that intervene between geographic conditions and man's behavior are no less important than natural facts. It is by studying a variety of ways of life and a variety of regions that the geographer can best perform his task, which is to study particular localities. Vidal stressed that the opportunities offered by a given locality may be exploited in different ways by different inhabitants; the geographer must not assume that a given environment implies a particular way of life but rather must consider the gradual modifications that the environment has undergone as a result of successive ways of life. Vidal demonstrated his method when he present-
31 7
ed a "geographical picture of France" in the first volume of a general history (1903b). No one has better depicted the subtlest variations in the landscapes of the regions of France and the related subtle variations in the common national way of life. To be sure, no country lends itself better than France to the reflections of a historian turned geographer. Yet Vidal wrote with equal penetration on the cities of the New World, which he regarded as the "most perfect expression of Americanism." Again, steeped though he was in the history of particular regions, such as the French provinces or the shores of the Mediterranean, he was nevertheless one of the first to stress the importance of establishing the role of trade and travel if one is to understand a region. Vidal broadened the horizons of human geography and made a place for it among the social sciences. Historians as well as geographers and sociologists have profited from his intellectual legacy. The work of Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch stems directly from that of Vidal. Febvre did not entirely accept Vidal's ideas, but he stressed their significance for an understanding of the earth and of human development. Bloch's researches in agrarian history are largely extensions by a historian of the ideas of a geographer. Although today Vidal's works are somewhat neglected, the best geographers and historians are Vidalians unawares. PIERRE MONBEIG [For the historical context of Vidal de la Blache's work, see the biographies of HUMBOLDT and RATZEL; for discussion of the subsequent development of his ideas, see GEOGRAPHY, especially the article on SOCIAL GEOGRAPHY; and the biographies of BLOCK and FEBVRE.] WORKS BY VIDAL DE LA BLACHE (1894) 1922 Histoire et geographic: Atlas general. New ed. Paris: Colin. 1896 Le principe de la geographic generate. Annales de geographic 5:129-142. 1898 La geographic politique a propos des ecrits de Frederic Ratzel. Annales de geographic 7:97-111. 1902 Les conditions geographiques des faits sociaux. Annales de geographie 11:13-23. 1903a La geographie humaine: Ses rapports avec la geographie de la vie. Revue de synthese historique 7:219— 240. 1903fo Tableau de la geographie de la France. Volume 1, part 1 in Ernest Lavisse, Histoire de France depuis les origines jusqu'a la Revolution. Paris: Hachette. -» Vidal's essay was partially translated in 1928 as The Personality of France. 1910 Les regions francaises. Revue de Paris 16:821—849. 1911 Les genres de vie dans la geographie humaine. Annales de geographie 20:193-212, 289-304. 1913 Des caracteres distinctifs de la geographie. Annales de geographie 22:289-299.
31 8
VIGILANCE
1917 La France de Vest: Lorraine, Alsace. Paris: Colin. (1922) 1926 Principles of Human Geography. New York: Holt. -» First published posthumously as Principes de geographic humaine. 1927-1948 Geographic universelle. 15 vols. Published under the direction of Paul Vidal de la Blache and Lucien Gallois. Paris: Colin.
VIGILANCE See ATTENTION.
VILLAGE Although sometimes applied to any permanent small settlement consisting of more than a few scattered dwellings, the term "village" usually refers to a consolidated agricultural community. In this usage, it is distinguished from such other types of settlement pattern as tribal camps, dispersed hamlets, suburbs, and towns, although in practice the lines of demarcation cannot always be drawn with unequivocal sharpness. So defined, the village was the predominant type of human community for over three millennia and continues to be so in most of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, as well as in some parts of Europe. The domestication of plants appeared in southwestern Asia perhaps as early as 10,000 B.C., but the emergence of the first true villages based on fully effective food production seems to have taken place almost three thousand years later, the earliest general date being 6750 B.C. for Jarmo in northeastern Iraq. In lower Egypt, this "village threshold," as it has been called, was crossed about 5000 B.C., in Atlantic Europe about 4000 B.C., in India about 2500 B.C., in west Africa about 1500 B.C., and in Mesoamerica it may have been as early as 3000 B.C. (The dates for China, although almost certainly prior to the second millennium B.C., remain undetermined.) Wherever the foodproducing revolution effectively replaced earlier hunting and gathering patterns, village life became established. The techniques of domestication spread rapidly, even to areas ecologically quite different from those in which they arose. Man's first serious attempt to shape his environment actively, rather than passively adapt to it, marked a new era of cultural development. The fullest achievements of this new era came only with what has sometimes been called the "urban revolution," or the appearance of civilization. Towns and cities emerged, based on the altered economic relationships. Paradoxically, it was the appearance of the political, economic, social, and religious developments associated with
urban centers that brought village life to its full development. With but a few exceptions, and those only partial—the Pueblo Indians of the American Southwest, the villages based on shifting cultivation in the tropical forest regions in Africa, South America, and southeast Asia, the taiga settlements of Siberia—the primary farming community did not long remain independent and autonomous but became an integral part of one or another civilizational complex, Mayan or Peruvian, Mesopotamian or Egyptian, Indie or Sinitic. Between the folk culture of the village and the sophisticated culture of urban or quasi-urban settlements, there developed a multifaceted interdependence that bound them, for all their contrasts, into a single sociocultural whole. Most recent research on village life has focused upon the analysis of this interdependence. The development of village studies Feudal Europe was the first field of research within which such a bipolar approach to the study of village life evolved. This was not altogether fortunate, since medieval Europe represented a somewhat atypical civilization, in which sophisticate culture was carried less by urban classes in the proper sense than by a dispersed, at least semirural, clergy and nobility. The studies of medieval village organization by von Maurer, Maine, Seebohm, Maitland, Vinogradoff, Coulton, Bloch, and Romans moved steadily from formal analyses centered mostly on land tenure regulations, systems of field rotation, and details of legal status to more broadly sociological interpretations that emphasized the deep embeddedness of the local community in an institutional structure which far transcended its boundaries. The growth of the manor system, the development of fairs and markets, the evolution of lords' courts, the growth of towns, and the increasing penetration of ecclesiastical institutions into local contexts knitted the village firmly into what Bloch pronounced the most characteristic feature of the civilization of medieval Europe: "the network of ties of dependence, extending from top to bottom of the social scale" (1939-1940). It was recognized that the picture of the fully self-contained farming community of preindustrial Europe, especially western Europe, facing the outside world as a hermetic unit is more a figment of a romantic imagination than a social reality. This recognition was rather more belated in studies of the Orient, the Middle East, and the New World, where the myth of a nearly absolute social discontinuity between the world of the ruling classes and that of the peas-
VILLAGE antry continued, and in fact persists in some quarters today. There were several reasons why the view that the traditional peasant village could be studied as a self-contained social microcosm rather than as a node in an extended social field disappeared more slowly outside the restricted purview of medieval studies. Perhaps the most important reason was that whereas the European researches were first undertaken by historians moving in upon the village to fill out their over-all picture of the feudal social order, those elsewhere in the world were, in the main, first undertaken by anthropologists transferring their interests, techniques, and concepts from the study of more or less isolated primitive tribes. The historian entered complex civilizations from above, the anthropologist from below, with the consequence that where the latter's village studies were, in general, far fuller, sociologically much more realistic, and more delicately sensitive to the quality, rather than the formal outlines, of peasant life, they were also, at first, generally more parochial, less analytically penetrating, and more flatly descriptive. The tendency to view a peasant village as yet one more bit of humanity complete in itself cut anthropologists off from some of the theoretically most significant dimensions of village communities. However, it brought them into a more intimate contact with the detailed content of life in such communities than even the most sociologically minded of the historians could achieve. Eventually it was precisely this greater realism that caused anthropologists to recognize the limitations of the microcosmic approach and compelled them to widen their field of interest beyond the boundaries of the village proper. Perhaps the most representative, as well as the most influential, figure in this transitional development was Robert Redfield. In his very first book, Tepoztldn, a Mexican Village (1930), Redfield was already concerned with the "impact" of the towns and cities of greater Mexico upon the life of his villagers. He set forth one of the earliest explicit conceptualizations of the peasant village as a type of community "intermediate between the primitive tribe and the modern city"; however, the study itself still treats the village as an autonomous unit, complete in itself, at best reacting defensively, and not very adequately, to external influences. It was not until his third, and perhaps still best-known, book, The Folk Culture of Yucatan (1941), that the focus on the theme, "city, town, village and tribe," moved to a central position. He attempted to relate these different types of human community to one an-
31 9
other and to postulate a series of changes that transform those at the "simpler" end of the continuum into those at the more "complex." However, the analysis of the peasant village of Chan Kom is still largely in terms of an independent, relatively isolated, and more or less homogeneous community of "folk culture" responding to forces impinging upon it from outside its well-defined boundaries. It was only in his later works, of which Peasant Society and Culture (1956) is perhaps most representative, that Redfield took the final step and specifically discarded the older anthropological model of the primitive isolate. He replaced it with a view of compound peasant society, of peasant communities as (borrowing a term from A. L. Kroeber) "part societies," and peasant cultures as "part cultures" in which their relations to the over-all civilization of which they are a part are not external, irritant elements, but integrated in their internal composition. Noting Kroeber's remark that anthropologists used to study organisms, societies by themselves, but now study organs, societies that are parts of larger societies, Redfield asked: "How are we to think about and study the small community as an organ and to study the larger organism of which it is a part?" And with this question the corner is turned in modern analyses of "non-Western" peasant villages as earlier it had been turned, less suddenly and less self-consciously, in the study of "Western" ones. Contemporary trends in analysis In contrasting "great" and "little" traditions Redfield himself provided one of the more useful tools in attacking the bipolar nature of the peasant village. In themselves, the ideas are not particularly novel. By a "great" tradition Redfield meant the refined, systematically organized, and consciously cultivated belief and value systems of the gentry, the clergy, etc., often referred to as "high culture"; by a "little" tradition he meant the cruder, less systematic, largely uncriticized cultural systems, often referred to as "folk culture," of the peasantry proper. If this unoriginal distinction has proved surprisingly useful in understanding the cultural metabolism of village life, it is because both Redfield and, more importantly, those who have followed in his footsteps have not been content merely to describe the two sorts of traditions but have directed their efforts toward tracing out the interactions between them. Attention has been given to the way in which elements of high culture filter down to local contexts to become part of one or another little tradi-
320
VILLAGE
tion, a process called "parochialization," and the way in which elements of local custom rise to become part of the overarching great tradition, a process called "universalization." In India, the advance of "Sanskritization"—the progressive penetration of high Indie culture patterns into village life—has been carefully analyzed (and debated); in Middle America, the peculiar process by which the folk culture of yesterday becomes the avantgarde culture of today has been examined; in southeast Asia, where several great traditions exist in one region, the effect on village religious patterns has been probed. Much interest has centered, also, on so-called cultural brokers, men (priests, schoolteachers, village chiefs, etc.) whose position permits or obligates them to mediate between the great traditions of the urban centers and the little traditions of the villages. This has also been true in studies of social institutions (pilgrimage sites, religious schools, artistic troupes) that, well or badly, play a similar role. And finally, some research has been directed toward analyses of the way in which tribal peoples, originally outside the sphere of a civilization, come to be integrated into it as true peasants through rephrasing their own cultural concerns in the vocabulary of the more comprehensive tradition. There has also been some examination of the adjustments necessitated on the local level when one great tradition more or less totally replaces another, as in post-Conquest Middle America. A somewhat different, but equally influential, approach to the analysis of the village has been that associated with Julian Steward in his treatment of "complex societies" (1955; Steward et al. 1956). Here, the emphasis is less cultural and more on social structure, but the reduction of the village from an organism to an organ is no less apparent. Steward sees the various part-societies of a complex or compound society as divided into vertical segments, horizontal segments, and formal institutions. Vertical segments are local units of various sorts, such as villages, neighborhoods, and households. Horizontal segments are special subsocieties—occupational, class, ethnic, and the like —which, like local units, may have a somewhat distinctive way of life, but which crosscut localities. Castes are a good example, but so also are interlocal trading communities, monastic orders, regional, political, or culural elites, and so on. Finally, formal institutions include the monetary system, the law, education, and organized religion —generalized structures that run through the whole society, "binding it together and affecting
it at every point." In this type of conceptualization, the peasant village is a vertical segment connected to towns, cities, and other villages by means of horizontal segments and formal institutions, which, spreading out from it in various directions, are at the same time basic elements of its internal organization. The very form of the village, much less the processes by which that form is maintained or changed, cannot be seen except against the background of the wider society in which it is embedded. Working within this framework, Eric Wolf (1955) has attempted to devise a typology of peasant villages in Latin America and then to apply the typology more generally to villages in the Old World as well as the New World. Starting with the assumption that a useful classification of peasant communities must center on differences in the way in which the communities are integrated with the outside world, he discriminated two main types: "closed" or "corporate" as opposed to "open." Closed, or corporate, communities are marked by a clear structural identity that persists over time, a sharp distinction between members and nonmembers, a steady-state approach to economic activities, and a number of characteristic cultural traits—a "cult of poverty" extolling hard work and simple living, "institutionalized envy" designed to keep any individual from advancing very far ahead of his fellows, and a self-conscious maintenance of local distinctiveness in dress, language, custom, etc. Open communities are marked by cash crop cultivation and consequently a less standoffish relation to the outside world. In fact the open community is in fairly continuous interaction with the outside world and is marked by greater social heterogeneity, intense concern with social status, and less attachment to established patterns of equilibrium. Wolf did not argue that these two categories provide an exhaustive typology, and suggested, in passing, five others that are also defined largely in terms of their form of integration with larger sociocultural systems. Other students have analyzed villages that combine elements from both of Wolf's primary types, referring to them as "open, corporate" villages. Still others have attempted to use the rubrics "centripetal" and centrifugal" to express differences in community structure. These are similar in context, although not identical, to the types Wolf has isolated: centripetal villages are those in which social institutions—economic, kinship, political, ritual—produce a constant tendency for members to move out beyond the village boundaries into the world of
VILLAGE the larger sociey; centrifugal villages are those in which such institutions tend to hold or draw back members within those boundaries. The classification of peasant villages has just begun, and largescale revisions in existing typologies must be expected as a greater knowledge of cross-cultural variations in community-society relationships accumulates. Apart from typological work (always no more than a preliminary to analysis), the study of the actual modes of linkage, the specific bonds between the village and the other segments and institutions of complex societies, has also been advancing, if hesitantly and on a rather mundane level of abstraction. Social networks, in contrast to social groups, are being examined. These are the widespread, intricate, usually rather irregular, and often rather fragile patterns of interpersonal relationships formed by trade, friendship, locally exogamous marriage, extravillage political loyalties, religious affiliation, and the like. As personto-person (or family-to-family) ties are brought from the periphery of anthropological analysis to its very center, the village is coming to be seen less as a solidary bloc unit set over against other solidary bloc units than as a focus upon which dissimilar social filaments partially converge. Studies of bazaar-type markets, of class-based or castebased service ties, of geographically extended kinship relations, and of religious discipleship have all been conducted in these "field theoretical" terms in recent years. Except for the work on markets, where a veritable revolution in our notions about the role and nature of trade in traditional civilizations is underway, pertinent concepts remain largely undeveloped. Having dealt with long-established customs on the one hand and defined social groups on the other, anthropologists are experiencing some difficulty in devising methods and concepts for coping with a type of social order in which both the form of personal relationships and their content are neither very clearly outlined nor neatly organized. Emerging issues in theory and research The increasing interest in the study of peasant villages—an interest bound to accelerate even further as the remaining independent tribal groups of the world themselves become integrated into larger sociocultural units—has thus brought with it not only new advances in the scientific analysis of society but has as well uncovered some awkward problems whose solutions are not yet in sight. Rather like the consideration of psychoanalytic
321
ideas that in the 1930s forced anthropology to confront the individual, village studies have introduced a serious conceptual and methodological crisis into that generally somewhat matter-of-fact discipline. One of the more important of such awkward problems is that of devising ways and means by which to characterize the commonly quite wide variability of village organization within a given region, civilization, society, nation, etc. Traditionally, anthropologists worried little about "representativeness." They assumed that the particular community under study was essentially so similar to other communities within the same culture sphere that its idiosyncrasies could be viewed as of secondary interest at best; or, alternatively, they attempted to isolate similarities shared by all or most of the communities lying within that sphere, and thus present some ideal typical image of "the village." It soon became quite apparent that, with respect to India, China, Middle America, medieval Europe, the Middle East, or even the more developed parts of Africa, neither of these approaches would really bear up under scrutiny. If village studies were not to abandon all claims to general significance, it became necessary to find some other, more differentiated way of describing village life in complex societies. Although both the "typical case" and the "common denominator" approaches have largely faded from the scene, at least in their more naive forms, there is as yet very little agreement as to what sort of approach is to replace them. There has been an attempt to refine the "typical case" approach by choosing for study a number of villages that are representative of at least the major variants in community type found in the society. Ecological variations have sometimes been employed in such studies, as for example in the multiple-investigator study The People of Puerto Rico (Steward et al. 1956) where villages based on coffee, tobacco, and sugar cultivation were studied independently and then compared and contrasted to give a differentiated picture of peasant life on the island. Dry-crop and irrigationbased, hill and plains, settled and shifting agriculture villages have been used in the same way. Another approach has been to choose villages in the major subcultural regions—a method virtually imposed by the variegated histories of such civilizations as the Indie or the Indonesian. Others have attempted to find some basic structural themes that are found in all or most villages in a given society; the limited range of variation is set by
322
VILLAGE
the restricted forms by which these themes may be expressed. Still others have traced the varying expression of a single dominant institution in the society to the same end—caste in India, politicoceremonial organization in Mesoamerica. These attempts all reduce village organizations to a repeating entity or an abstracted ideal type. A genuinely satisfactory method for discovering, analyzing, and describing the village society as an ordered set of variations has yet to be developed. The factor of social change has increasingly forced its way into the center of attention in village studies. The fact that virtually all the peasant villages of the world are now caught up, to some degree, in the deep-going processes of cultural transformation associated with the universal diffusion of the social and economic patterns of modern industrial civilization makes any static analysis of village life seem quaint to the point of irrelevancy. There has been an upsurge of concern with both the histories of particular villages and with refining our methods for distinguishing between legend, myth, and factual history in such a way that these varying views of the local past can be effectively related to one another in analyzing processes of change. Although such studies can hardly be said to have advanced very far, such historical analyses can no longer be dismissed as "mere speculation." There have also been a few tentative attempts, usually based on ecological considerations, to trace the general, long-term pattern of village development in a particular region. Recognition that most of the villages in Europe, Japan, and much of Latin America stand in complementary relationship not to a classical great tradition of great antiquity, a bazaar-type market system, or a traditional hereditary elite, but rather to modern mass culture, a highly industrialized economy, and a thoroughly bureaucratized government, has led to a search for new formulations of the bipolar nature of village life. Although here, too, little more than a recognition of the problem and a certain amount of descriptive work has been so far achieved, research on what might be called "postpeasant" villages is going on with increased intensity in many areas—Italy, Japan, France, Brazil, Yugoslavia, Holland, Scandinavia, etc.— and can be expected to lead to important revisions in both theory and method. In the most general terms, the conceptual and methodological crisis that the study of village life has forced upon anthropology can be phrased as a pressing necessity to discover the ways in which the findings of studies of small-scale communities can be made relevant to the understanding of
large-scale societies. The exact place of anthropological analyses of village life among the quite differently oriented studies made by economists, political scientists, historians, sociologists, psychologists, and others in the countries of the so-called underdeveloped world is not yet clear. In this very old but also very new field of scientific interest, the major task is to make clear, and thus to demonstrate the significance of, a multidimensional understanding of traditional, transitional, and modern society. CLIFFORD GEERTZ [Directly related are the entries ANTHROPOLOGY, article On THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDY OF MODERN SOCIETY; FEUDALISM; HISTORY, article on SOCIAL HISTORY; PEASANTRY;
URBAN REVOLUTION.
Other
relevant material may be found in the biography of REDFIELD.] BIBLIOGRAPHY BANFIELD, EDWARD C. 1958 The Moral Basis of a Backward Society. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. BEARDSLEY, RICHARD K. et al. 1959 Village Japan. Univ. of Chicago Press. BLOCK, MARC (1939-1940) 1961 Feudal Society. Univ. of Chicago Press. -> First published as La societe feodale: La formation des liens de dependence and La societe feodale: Les classes et le gouvernement des hommes. BRAIDWOOD, ROBERT J.; and WILLEY, GORDON R. (editors) 1962 Courses Toward Urban Life: Archeological Considerations of Some Cultural Alternates. Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology, Vol. 32. Chicago: Aldine. COHN, B. S. 1961 The Pasts of an Indian Village. Comparative Studies in Society and History 3:241-250. FRIEDL, ERNESTINE 1963 Studies in Peasant Life. Biennial Review of Anthropology [1963]: 276-306. GEERTZ, CLIFFORD 1962 Studies in Peasant Life: Community and Society. Biennial Review of Anthropology [1961]: 1-41. ROMANS, GEORGE (1941) 1960 English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century. New York: Russell. MARRIOTT, McKiM (editor) 1955 Village India: Studies in the Little Community. Univ. of Chicago Press. -» Also published as Memoir No. 83 of the American Anthropological Association. REDFIELD, ROBERT 1930 Tepoztldn, a Mexican Village: A Study of Folk Life. Univ. of Chicago Press. REDFIELD, ROBERT 1941 The Folk Culture of Yucatan. Univ. of Chicago Press. REDFIELD, ROBERT 1956 Peasant Society and Culture: An Anthropological Approach to Civilization. Univ. of Chicago Press; Cambridge Univ. Press. STEWARD, JULIAN H. 1955 Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press. STEWARD, JULIAN H. et al. 1956 The People of Puerto Rico: A Study in Social Anthropology. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press. WOLF, ERIC 1955 Types of Latin American Peasantry: A Preliminary Discussion. American Anthropologist New Series 57:452-471.
VISION: Overview VISION i. OVERVIEW n. EYE MOVEMENTS in. COLOR VISION AND COLOR BLINDNESS iv. VISUAL DEFECTS
Conrad G. Mueller Lorrin A. Riggs A. Chapanis Albert J. Harris
OVERVIEW
Vision is one of man's most important sensory channels. Although the visual system responds to a very narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum, radiations having wave lengths ranging from 400 to 700 millimicrons, the loss of this system seriously limits our ability to adapt to our environment. Light reflected from objects and living organisms provides us with many diverse kinds of information necessary for responding to environmental change. Vision is important in many quick, reflex adjustments to the environment. At a more complex level, it is important in responding to facial expressions and other gestures of living organisms. Visual functions In order to understand the importance of vision in behavior, we must be concerned with what the visual system can and cannot do. The visual system makes possible many basic discriminations, and it is upon these that we must build in responding to the infinite number of subtle cues provided by the environment. Absolute sensitivity. The most primitive visual discrimination, of course, is our response to the presence or absence of light. All other uses of vision presuppose that this discrimination is possible. Whether a visual stimulus is seen will depend, first of all, on its intensity, a fact that makes the measurement of threshold one of the basic measurements in studying the visual system. An intensity threshold is a statement of the intensity that is just sufficient to make a light stimulus visible. The numerical value of the intensity threshold will depend upon many specific characteristics of the object viewed. For example, the intensity required to see large objects is less than that required for small objects; the intensity threshold is low for stimuli exposed for a long time, high for stimuli presented for a brief period. The threshold for detecting a stimulus is higher if we look directly at the stimulus figure than if it appears off to the side of our line of sight. [See PSYCHOPHYSICS.] Some statements about human visibility, such as the last one, seem to violate our intuitive notions about seeing. In many of these cases we can trace
323
the discrepancy to the manner in which we describe what is seen. In general, we are better able to resolve the details of an object if we look directly at it. However, a stimulus must be about ten times more intense to reach the threshold for central vision than to reach the threshold for peripheral vision. Spatial discrimination. A second basic kind of discrimination that is possible with the visual system is the sensation (resolution) of spatial arrangements of light. Our ability to see spatial detail is called visual acuity. There are two major types of acuity, one of which is called visible acuity, the other, separable acuity. Visible acuity. Visible acuity refers to the ability to see small objects against a background. One common technique for measuring it is to determine the finest dark line that is visible against a brighter background. The numerical value of acuity obtained under a given test condition is computed by taking the reciprocal of the threshold width of line, measured in terms of the visual angle subtended by this line at the eye. The angle is measured in minutes of visual angle. The reason for using the angular measure, rather than just stating the width of the line, is that the size of the object alone is not critical in predicting whether an object will be seen; the size is important only in relation to the distance the object is from the eye. Under optimal testing circumstances, man's visible acuity permits him to detect lines subtending approximately 0.5 seconds of visual angle. This is equivalent to a line less than 1/100 inch in width, viewed at 100 yards. Separable acuity. The second type of acuity is separable acuity; this refers to the ability to see a repetitive pattern as being striated or checkered. A common procedure for measuring separable acuity is to present a series of parallel lines equally spaced, i.e., a dark line, a bright line, a dark line, etc., all of equal width. The numerical measure of acuity used in this case is also an angular measure, the angular separation between adjacent dark lines (or bright lines) required for just detecting the striation. The threshold angle for separable acuity is about fifty to one hundred times greater than the threshold angle obtained with visible acuity, and there is evidence that the upper limit on separable acuity is imposed by the mosaic structure of the sense cells in the eye. The smallest separable angles one can obtain are between 30 seconds and one minute of visual angle; appropriate computation indicates that this corresponds to the diameter of the sense cells in the eye. Both of these types of acuity are influenced by the intensity of the light background against which
324
VISION: Overview
the dark lines are seen. Acuity is poor when it is measured at low intensity levels; it is good when the intensity levels are high. Temporal discrimination. A third kind of visual discrimination of which we are capable involves sensitivity to temporal changes in the stimulus (temporal resolution). In this case interest centers on the ability to detect the temporal alternation of light and darkness. The typical procedure for measuring this ability is to measure what is called the critical fusion frequency. This is done by presenting alternating periods of light and dark and gradually increasing the rate of alternation until a steady light is seen. We can also measure the frequency of alternation that could just be seen as flickering; this is called the critical flicker frequency. These thresholds are essentially the same, although there are subtle differences between them. Both are called CFF. There are certain rates of alternation of light and dark that cannot be seen. We do not usually see the ripples of intensity in household lighting, most of which operates on current alternating at either 50 or 60 cycles per second. We do not usually see the flicker in commercial movies, although we frequently do see it in home movies because the number of alternations per second is lower. Our ability to see temporally alternating light patterns depends on the intensity at which we make the measurement. When lights of high intensity alternate with dark periods, the alternation rate at which they fuse will be high, e.g., 50 or more cycles per second. Light of low intensity alternating with darkness may appear steady at repetition rates of 10 or 15 times per second. The CFF depends upon the size of the stimulus; the larger the size of the stimulus, the higher the fusion rate. The CFF also depends on the region of the visual field in which the alternating stimulus appears; the visual system is better at resolving alternating patterns in the peripheral field than it is in the central field. Discrimination of wave-length differences. It is important to emphasize that we are not equally sensitive to all wave lengths in the region from 400 m/jL to 700 m/x. We are relatively insensitive to the extremes of the visible spectrum, i.e., to red and blue; we are maximally sensitive to the middle of this spectrum, i.e., to the yellow and green portions. When we attempt to measure the sensitivity to different wave lengths quantitatively, we discover that we possess two different sensitivity functions. We obtain one of these if we stimulate in the peripheral part of the visual field; this function is most easily obtained if we have first allowed
the eye to become accustomed to the dark. We obtain the second if we measure the sensitivity to different wave lengths by presenting the stimulus in the central field of vision. Duplicity theory—rods and cones. The first of these functions, obtained in the periphery, has a peak sensitivity at about 505 m/x and is called the scotopic visibility curve; the second of these functions has a peak sensitivity at about 555 m^i and is called the photopic visibility curve. The distinction between these two curves is important in several respects, since they appear to represent the action of two separate visual systems. The scotopic curve is usually attributed to the action of those sense cells called rods. These cells are present in large numbers in the periphery and are completely absent in the most central part of the eye. The photopic curve is felt to be due to the action of sense cells called cones. These are the only sense cells found in the very center of the retina; they are present, but in relatively small numbers, in the periphery. Since we lack color vision in the extreme periphery of the eye and have maximum color discrimination in the central field of vision, the cones and the photopic systems are considered to provide the mechanism for color vision. This view of the separate responsibilities of the rods and cones is called the duplicity theory. Cotor blindness. All physical systems that respond differentially to various wave lengths possess, by definition, a differential sensitivity to wave lengths. In this trivial sense, probably all living organisms are sensitive to some wave-length differences. However, we reserve the term "wave-length discrimination" for the special case where the differences in the effect of two wave lengths cannot be eliminated by adjusting the intensity of either one. This turns out to be a rather exacting requirement. On the basis of this requirement, a number of species are said to lack color discrimination. Humans possess this ability as a species, but some individual members of the species do not possess this ability. They are said to be totally color-blind. Individuals who are color-blind perform differently than the normal observer in a number of ways. There are several varieties of color deficiency other than total color blindness. Individuals who have color deficiencies are likely to exhibit abnormal wave-length discrimination curves, and they are likely to see one portion of the visible spectrum as colorless. The portion of the spectrum that will appear colorless will depend on the type of color deficiency. Color vision. We can measure threshold differences in wave length by selecting a standard stim-
VISION: Overview ulus having some reference wave length and adjusting the wave length of a comparison stimulus figure until the two stimuli are just detectably different in hue. If we repeat this procedure many times, using different standard wave lengths, we can determine how our capacity to see differences in hue varies with the region of the spectrum in which we are operating. The threshold differences in wave length vary, in a complex way, with the wave length of the standard stimulus, but the results can be crudely summarized by saying that over most of the visible spectrum we are able to detect differences of approximately two or three millimicrons. It has been estimated that there are about 120 discriminable color steps in the range from 400 m/z to 700 m/u. One of the basic findings of color-mixture experiments is that it is possible to achieve color matches for all wave lengths in the visible spectrum by selecting three fixed wave lengths—called primaries or primary wave lengths—in the visible range and mixing them in different amounts and different combinations. This fact has provided one of the empirical bases for the generally accepted trichromatic, or three-color, theory of color vision. Light and dark adaptation. One of the most impressive features of the visual system is the range of intensities over which it can operate. If we are properly adapted to the level of illumination, we can easily see, and move among, objects on a moonlit night or see clearly on a sun-drenched beach. The intensities involved in these two situations may differ by a factor of about ten million. The processes that permit this latitude of adjustment are called dark and light adaptation. These processes of accommodation to different illumination levels take time. The process of adaptation to the dark is the slower process; after being exposed to the intensity levels of a sunny beach, it will take us from thirty minutes to an hour to acquire full sensitivity at the level of moon illumination. The reverse process, light adaptation, is by comparison more rapid, requiring approximately five to ten minutes. When it was said that acuity and flicker discrimination are better at high intensities than at low intensities, it was meant to apply only when we are adapted to these intensities. Most visual performances at high intensities are adversely affected if we are adapted to a very low intensity just prior to making the measurements. Visual mechanisms The study of what man can and cannot see has been accompanied by an interest in how he sees,
325
i.e., in the anatomical and physiological basis of vision. Light as a stimulus for human behavior achieves its effectiveness by virtue of the elaborate machinery possessed by the human body for detecting and processing the information contained in the radiant energy in the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum. The primary sources for this energy are the sun and numerous "artificial" light sources. The great diversity of patterns of light to which we must respond results partly from the variety of light sources but more importantly from the countless gradations of reflections and transmissions of light by the many objects in the environment. The processes of detecting and analyzing these intricate patterns of light begin with lights (1) entering the eye through the cornea; (2) passing through the pupil, a label for the opening in a structure called the iris; and (3) being modified by the lens, which permits fine adjustments in the optical power of the eye to bring the light to focus on the retina. The retina is a layer of structures on the inside of the eye. This layer contains the light-sensitive receptor cells and an elaborately connected system of nerve cells. It is in this layer that light is detected and converted into activity in the fibers of the optic nerve. The information contained in this optic nerve activity is then transmitted to and further analyzed by the higher centers of the nervous system. It is quite clear that many of the characteristics of visual sensitivity discussed in the previous section result directly from the properties of this physiological system. The rods and sensitivity. We have already had occasion to refer to the fact that the sense cells in the retina fall into two main groups, the rods and the cones. These cells are separable, both structurally and functionally. A photosensitive material, rhodopsin, has been extracted from the rods, and many of its physical and biochemical properties are well known. When light is absorbed, this substance is changed into retinene, which, in the presence of an appropriate enzyme system, is changed to vitamin A. In the proper biochemical environment, retinene is reformed from vitamin A and in turn regenerates rhodopsin. The fact that these reactions are reversible led early investigators to speak of this set of chemical events as the visual cycle. The importance of these chemical events for vision is now widely accepted and may be illustrated by the fact that the absorption curve for rhodopsin corresponds closely to the human dim-visibility curve and that the absolute thresholds change substantially with vitamin A deficiency, as well as by many other observations.
326
VISION: Overview
Although the linkage between the rhodopsin cycle and certain aspects of visual sensitivity is firmly established, the early expectation that changes in concentration of rhodopsin resulting from the presence of light would account directly for the sensitivity changes during adaptation now seems unlikely. The critical word here is "directly." The concentration changes are in the right direction, and they have the appropriate time course; therefore, most investigators feel that the rhodopsin cycle is still clearly implicated in the processes of light and dark adaptation. The difficulty is that the changes in concentration of rhodopsin resulting from light stimulation fall far short of those required if the threshold changes measured in the human observer are to be explained by the lighttrapping quality per se of this photochemical system. Some additional mechanism must be involved to yield the large changes in sensitivity. The exact nature of this additional mechanism (or mechanisms) is not established at the present time. The evidence derived from the performance of the rod system under optimum test circumstances suggests that the visual sense cell comes very close to being a perfect radiant-energy detector. Stated in another way, it appears that the sensitivity of the rods is such that a single cell can respond when a single light quantum is absorbed. A quantum is the smallest packet of energy that can be radiated or absorbed by any physical system. Many investigators feel that the human rod can, in fact, respond to a single quantum absorption; even the most conservative estimates of rod sensitivity require no more than two or three quantal absorptions. How such small energy exchanges lead to the neural processes required to activate the higher brain centers is not completely understood. The retina and the optic nerve. Absorption of quanta by the sense cell leads to electrical changes in the various layers of the retina and eventually to activity in individual nerve fibers in the optic nerve. The messages in these nerves occur in the form of trains of nerve impulses; each impulse is a brief electrochemical change (of the order of 1/1000 second in duration) that is propagated along the nerve fiber at a uniform speed. There are about one million individual nerve fibers in one of our optic nerves, and each of the nerve fibers serves a particular region of the retina. The region of sensitivity of a given fiber is called its receptive field, and the receptive field of a particular fiber will overlap with the receptive fields of many, but not all, other fibers. Because the optical properties of the eye produce an orderly projection of the light in the
environment onto the retina and because individual nerve fibers are stimulated only by light in a restricted region of the retina, it follows that there must be considerable specialization among the nerve fibers in the optic nerve. This specialization does exist, but it is not perfect or complete. One reason for the imperfection becomes apparent when we consider the amount of convergence that is forced on the visual system by the anatomical details of retinal structure. There are about 125 million sense cells in the retina of each eye; there are only one million fibers in the optic nerve coming from each eye. These figures mean that in the representation of light patterns there must be a convergence, on the average, of 125 to 1. This figure is only an average, and it must be viewed cautiously when we think about visual function. Some fibers in the optic nerve may serve only a few sense cells, as is the case with fibers coming from the fovea, that part of the retina stimulated by a spot of light placed along the main line of sight of the eye. It is in the foveal region that we possess our greatest visual acuity. Other fibers in the optic nerve may serve several hundred sense cells; this is the common situation for the cells in the periphery of the retina, regions serving us when a spot of light is presented off to the side of our main line of sight. It has been suggested, for example, that the high sensitivity in the periphery may be due in part, if not completely, to these differences in neural connections in the two parts of the retina. There are many direct lines of evidence showing that visual sense cells do not possess separate and independent information tracks to the higher brain centers. One kind of evidence comes from a conceptually simple experiment. When we record the electrical response of a single optic nerve fiber stimulated by a small spot of light and compare this response with that obtained when we present this light simultaneously with a second light in an adjoining region, we find that the responses are different. This is a simple example of the complex interactions that take place before any message leaves the retina. As the messages concerning patterns of light, shadows, and colors are carried to the higher centers in the brain many additional interactions are introduced. While we still lack a complete understanding of the neurophysiology of the visual system, rapid advances have been made in the last decade or two, and a number of facts are now available. There is a spatial localization of activity in the brain, linked with the position of the stimulus in the field of
VISION: Eye Movements view and therefore with the part of the retina stimulated. The kind of response a single nerve cell will give depends on the nature of the stimulation. Sometimes a cell will respond to the onset of the stimulus, sometimes to the termination; sometimes it will signal both the onset and the termination but will give no response to steady illumination. In a given test situation the cell will give one of these responses and do so reliably. For most nerve cells there are clearly denned regions in the visual field that will yield "on" responses and other regions that will yield "off" responses. The interaction of these regions is such that if they are stimulated equally, no response will occur. The organization of these fields leads to a new and different kind of specialization of function. There are cells that will respond to certain shapes and not to others; some cells respond to certain orientations of a figure and not to other orientations; some cells respond to stimuli moving in one direction and not in another. Data obtained by recording the electrical activity of the individual nerve cells in the brain have begun to provide a firm foundation for understanding the physiological basis of form and movement discrimination. In an analogous way, we find a degree of specialization of function when we study the responsiveness of individual cells to lights of different wave lengths, i.e., to colors. Some cells show maximum sensitivity to one band of wave lengths; other cells have maximum sensitivity to another part of the visible spectrum. Such results are rapidly providing information on which we can. build a physiological theory of color vision and color blindness. CONRAD G. MUELLER [Other relevant material may be found in NERVOUS SYSTEM, article on STRUCTURE AND FUNCTION OF THE BRAIN; PERCEPTION; PSYCHOLOGY, article On PHYSIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY; PsYCHOPHYSICS;
SENSES; and in the biographies of HELMHOLTZ; HERING; MULLER, JOHANNES.] BIBLIOGRAPHY GENERAL REFERENCES
GELDARD, FRANK A. 1953 The Human Senses. New York: Wiley. MORGAN, CLIFFORD T. (1943) 1965 Physiological Psychology. 3d ed. New York: McGraw-Hill. MUELLER, CONRAD G. 1965 Sensory Psychology. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. OSGOOD, CHARLES E. (1953) 1959 Method and Theory in Experimental Psychology. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. STEVENS, S. S. (editor) 1951 Handbook of Experimental Psychology. New York: Wiley. WOODWORTH, ROBERT S.; and SCHLOSBERG, HAROLD (1938) 1960 Experimental Psychology. Rev. ed.
327
New York: Holt. -> Woodworth was the sole author of the 1938 edition. READINGS AND SYMPOSIA
BARTLEY, SAMUEL H. (1941) 1963 Vision: A Study of Its Basis. Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand. GRAHAM, CLARENCE H. (editor) 1965 Vision and Visual Perception. New York: Wiley. LE GRAND, YVES (1948) 1957 Light, Colour and Vision. New York: Wiley. -» A translation of Lumiere et couleurs, first published in 1948 as Volume 2 of Le Grand's Optique physiologique. Mechanisms of Vision. 1960 Journal of General Physiology 43, no. 6, part 2:1-195. -> Symposium held at the Institute Venezolano de Investigaciones Cientificas, Caracas, Venezuela, July 31-August 3, 1959. Photoreception. 1958 New York Academy of Sciences, Annals 74, article 2:161-406. -> Papers presented at a conference on photoreception held in New York City, January 31-February 1, 1958. PIRENNE, MAURICE H. 1948 Vision and the Eye. London: Chapman & Hall. Symposium on Electrophysiology of the Visual System. 1958 American Journal of Ophthalmology 46, no. 3, part 2:1-182. -» Papers presented at a symposium held in Bethesda, Maryland, January 16-17, 1958. Symposium on Physiological Optics. 1963 Journal of the Optical Society of America 53, no. 1:1-201. -» Papers presented at a symposium held in Washington, D.C., March 14-17, 1962. WALLS, GORDON L. 1942 The Vertebrate Eye and Its Adaptive Radiation. Bloomfield Hills, Mich.: Cranbrook Institute of Science. II EYE MOVEMENTS
Human vision involves both looking and seeing. The eyes must actively pursue one direction of regard after another in order, for example, for a person to drive a car, read a book, or simply admire a view. This is because the only objects we see clearly are those that are imaged on the fovea, a small spot at the very center of the receptor surface at the back of the eye. The principal function of eye movements is thus to enable us to survey the visual environment, bringing one portion of it after another into line with the central fovea. This function requires a precise and efficient neuromuscular mechanism for linking the two eyes. The neuromuscular basis of eye movements can best be understood by considering each eye as a globe within a bony orbit or socket. The eye socket is lined with fibrous tissue that is sufficiently elastic to permit extensive rotation of the globe. Horizontal, vertical, and oblique rotations are produced by three pairs of muscles attached to the globe at appropriate points. The two muscles of each pair act reciprocally. For example, the contraction of one horizontal muscle rotates the eye to the right, and the contraction of the other, to the left; but
328
VISION: Eye Movements
when one is active, the other is relaxed so as not to oppose it. The muscles of each eye are controlled by nerve fibers proceeding from the third, fourth, and sixth cranial nerves. Midbrain nuclei for these nerves are controlled, in turn, by fibers that run principally from the frontal lobe of the cortex, for voluntary eye movements, and from the occipital lobe, for involuntary and pursuit movements. Eye movements are critically affected by stimulation of the vestibular apparatus of the inner ear. It has been shown that eye movements can be elicited in experimental animals by electrical stimulation of many regions of the brain in the parietal—as well as the frontal and occipital—lobes, in the cerebellum, and in the brain stem. Saccadic and conjugate movements. Human eye movements have been recorded by a number of experimental techniques. The most common form of ophthalmograph (eye-movement camera) is one in which a continuously moving film registers the momentary location of each eye, by responding to light that is reflected from the front surface of the cornea. Studies of this type of eye movement, which is required for reading, reveal that reading involves a succession of saccadic (jumpy) movements separated by pauses having a duration of about a fifth of a second. As a line of print is read from left to right, about four to eight of these pauses are made, whereupon the reader jumps back to the beginning of the next line and goes on with the same pattern. A good reader pauses only four or five times on each line, and his eye movements are so fast and accurate that they occupy scarcely 10 per cent of the reading time. A poor reader, on the other hand, pauses more times per line. His eyes may also retrace or dwell upon long or unfamiliar words. The inspection of such materials as photographs or geometrical diagrams also involves saccadic eye movements that carry the various parts of the figure into the center of foveal vision for most accurate discrimination. The two eyes exhibit such accurately coordinated (conjugate) movements that a given point of the inspection figure affects corresponding points on each eye, at all times. Convergent and divergent movements. In another method of recording eye movements a plane mirror is attached to each eye and light reflected from it is focused onto a moving photographic film. This method of recording is sufficiently sensitive to be used for another form of eye movement— namely, the convergence of the eyes that takes place when observing an object that is nearby. Records made by embedding a small mirror in a tightly fitting contact lens worn on each eye reveal that an
observer's eyes alternately converge and diverge in order to look at a near point and a far one, respectively. Measurements have shown that a good observer performs vergence with great accuracy, thus assuring single vision and the stereoscopic fusion of the images seen by the two eyes under various conditions of object distance. It will be noted that vergence requires the eyes to move in opposite directions. They are, thus, completely different from the conjugate movements that take place when one looks from point to point of a figure seen at a constant distance from the observer. Vergence is also much slower and smoother than conjugate movements and more automatic in its action. Fine, involuntary movements. A refinement of the plane-mirror technique permits the recording of still finer eye movements—namely, those that occur in spite of the observer's attempts to fixate as steadily as possible. These minimal eye movements are tremors; small saccades, or jumps; and irregular drifts. Tremors and drifts appear to be largely independent of visual control, but the saccades serve to bring the eyes back to the center of fixation after they have wandered off. Other functions of eye movements. It is clear that the eyes are never completely at rest. Optical techniques have been devised to counteract these minimal eye movements and, consequently, to cause an image to remain motionless on the retina of the eye. The result is the washing out and ultimate disappearance of any objects that are imaged in this way. Clearly, then, an additional function of eye movements is to prevent this temporary failure of vision so that prolonged observation can be maintained—for example, in sighting a gun or using a microscope on stationary objects. However, the eyes are often required to observe moving objects, as in watching a game being played. In other cases, the observer himself may be moving, as in riding in a moving vehicle. Still more complex is the situation in which both occur, as in driving down a road and observing an oncoming car simultaneously. In each case the perception is such that there is a reference frame or stationary world with respect to which both the observer and the observed objects are judged to be moving. The apparent stability of the reference frame must be brought about by a complex sensorimotor feedback system involving postural reflexes, motions of the retinal image, and eye movements. It is obvious that so complex a mechanism must be based on "built-in" connections widely distributed throughout the nervous system and that its proper functioning requires normal patterns of maturation and development.
VISION: Color Vision and Color Blindness Factors affecting eye movements. A mechanism as complex as that controlling eye movements must, of course, be subject to malfunction due to congenital neural defects, the effects of drugs, or unusual environmental factors. Some congenital defects are forms of nystagmus, a class of eye movements having a rhythmic character that is at least partly nonvisual in its basis. A common example of the effects of drugs is the diplopia (double images) associated with alcoholism. This typically results from esotropia (abnormal turning inwards) of the eyes when attempting to fixate distant objects or exotropia (turning outwards) for near ones. Unusual environmental factors include the rhythmic motion of a ship or aircraft, which may induce motion sickness. Strong vestibular stimulation can also result from placing a person on a rotating platform or chair or from injecting a warm solution into the external canal of one ear. In all these cases, abnormal eye movements are likely to appear. In general, these movements are compensatory—that is, rotating a person to the right causes the eyes to move to the left until a limit is reached, and the eyes then quickly return to the right. The sequence of slow movements to the left followed by rapid ones to the right is reversed when motion of the body is stopped. This reversal of eye movements is known as postrotational nystagmus. LORRIN A. RIGGS [Other relevant material may be found in DREAMS; PERCEPTION, articles on DEPTH PERCEPTION and ILLUSIONS AND AFTEREFFECTS; READING DISABILITIES; SLEEP.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
ALPERN, MATHEW 1962 Movements of the Eyes. Volume 3, pages 1-187 in Hugh Davson (editor), The Eye. New York: Academic Press. CARMICHAEL, LEONARD; and DEARBORN, WALTER F. 1947 Reading and Visual Fatigue. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. RIGGS, LORRIN A.; and NIEHL, ELIZABETH W. 1960 Eye Movements Recorded During Convergence and Divergence. Journal of the Optical Society of America 50:913-920. RIGGS, LORRIN A.; and RATLIFF, FLOYD 1951 Visual Acuity and the Normal Tremor of the Eyes. Science 114:17-18. Ill
COLOR VISION AND COLOR BLINDNESS
Color vision means the ability to see colors, to perceive and to discriminate objects on the basis of variations in the composition of the radiant energy that they emit, transmit, or reflect.
329
The richness, variety, and importance of normal color experience are truly impressive. Indeed, archeological findings show that color has played an important role in man's culture even in prerecorded history. Ability to see colors contributes immeasurably to ideas of beauty and to the aesthetic appreciation of objects in the everyday world. Color is used routinely in business, industry, science, and medicine to code and identify objects and to communicate information. Color also seems to be associated with a variety of affective responses, feelings, emotions, and moods—liking, disliking, excitement, depression, etc. Although scientific understanding of the basis for these emotional concomitants of color is rudimentary, the consequences of such affective overtones are immensely important even in such practical things as the packaging and marketing of a large number of consumer products and in the enjoyment of them. The stimulus for color vision. Seeing an object is dependent on light from that object entering the eyes. The light may be generated and emitted by self-luminous objects, such as light bulbs, phosphorescent substances, and the sun; reflected from nonluminous objects, such as table tops, paints, and fabrics; or transmitted through filters, such as certain glasses, plastics, and liquids. In actual fact, all three processes are involved in producing most visible rays of light. For example, a given light ray may have been emitted originally by the filament of a light bulb, filtered while being transmitted through the glass envelope around the filament, and further modified through reflection from a surface. The light to which our eyes are sensitive consists of a narrow band of radiation in the electromagnetic spectrum. This spectrum extends from the invisible, miles-long radio waves, through the yards-long waves used in television and FM broadcasting and the still shorter infra-red heat waves, across the visible spectrum to the invisible ultrashort ultraviolet waves, and out to the infinitesimally short waves of cosmic radiation. The visible spectrum consists of those waves that are roughly from 385 to 770 m/ji (millimicrons) in length. When a beam of white light is dispersed by a prism and separated into its component wave lengths, the visible spectrum appears as a variegated display of vivid colors. Starting with deep violet at the short wave length end of the spectrum, the colors shade imperceptibly into bluish purple, blue, bluegreen, green, yellow-green, yellow, orange, and deep red at the long wave length end. Practically never, however, does an ordinary person see the colors produced by isolated wave
330
VISION: Color Vision and Color Blindness
lengths of radiation. The light coming from most objects is a mixture of a large number of wave lengths, and it is the particular combination of these wave lengths and the relative amounts of energy in them that give an object its characteristic color. If the distribution of wave lengths in a ray of light is known, its color can be specified exactly. The reverse is not true, however. A given color can be produced by any one of an infinite number of combinations of wave lengths. The visual system. Decades of intensive research have still not clarified precisely how the eye and its associated neural structures transform radiant energy into color experience. It is known, however, that one of the most important steps in this transformation occurs in the light-sensitive layer of the eye, the retina, which is the innermost of three tunics or coats in the back part of the eyeball. Although the entire retina has an average thickness of only 300 microns (0.3 millimeters), microscopic examination reveals it to be a structure of prodigious complexity. Ten distinct layers contain literally hundreds of millions of nerve cells and fibers. So intricate is the network of interconnections among these elements that anatomists have succeeded only in tracing out some of their grosser features. Just within the outermost (most rearward) layer of the retina is a layer of rod and cone cells. Although there is little doubt that absorption of light takes place within these rods and cones and is converted by them into nerve impulses, the exact process is not yet completely understood. It is known, too, that the rod and cone cells serve two different functions in vision. The former, of which there are about 120,000,000 in the human eye, are primarily involved in seeing under extremely dim illuminations, below that of full moonlight. These rods are achromatic receptors; that is, they respond only with sensations of white and various shades of gray, no matter what wave lengths stimulate them. The cones, of which there are about 6,500,000 in the normal eye, operate most effectively at high levels of illumination such as are normally encountered in daylight. These are the receptors that provide sharp form acuity and ability to see chromatic colors. Color vision theories Although theories of color vision abound in the scientific literature, it is safe to say that no single theory is consistent with all the known facts of normal and abnormal color vision (Judd 1951, pp. 830-836). Most theories agree, however, that there
must be several types of photosensitive elements in the normal eye and that these different receptors are differentially sensitive to various segments of the visible spectrum. Further, most theories agree that different colors are experienced because of blends of responses resulting from the stimulation of these different kinds of receptors in various proportions. Young-Helmholtz theory. The facts of color vision require that there be at least three different kinds of receptors in the eye. It was the physician Thomas Young who first recognized this fact. In 1801 he advanced the notion that there are three fundamental kinds of receptors in the eye, one sensitive primarily to red, one to yellow, and one to blue. Other color sensations, he reasoned, resulted from the additive effects of the outputs from each of these three receptors. A year later, however, Young changed his three receptors to red, green, and violet, on the basis of some new observations carried out on the spectrum by W. H. Wollaston. Young's theory appears to have been largely ignored for the next half century and it was not until 1852 that the great German physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz resurrected and championed it. Since that time the theory has been commonly referred to as the Young-Helmholtz theory. In proposing three fundamental receptors, the Young-Helmholtz theory is scientifically parsimonious. Three, however, is merely a lower limit and other theorists have postulated as many as seven different kinds of receptors [see HELMHOLTZ; see also Hartridge 1950, pp. 256-293]. Hering's theory. For all of its attractiveness, the Young-Helmholtz theory has never been able to explain satisfactorily certain facts of color experience. Chief among these are the apparent linkages that appear to exist beween certain pairs of colors when either the stimulus conditions or the conditions of the human observer are systematically changed. For example, the discrimination of yellow and blue becomes much worse than that of red and green as the size of the stimulus is decreased. As another example, certain pairs of colors typically drop out in congenital color vision defects and in certain diseases of the eye. To take account of such data the physiologist Ewald Hering proposed in 1874 that there are three independent visual substances in the retina, each capable of reacting in either of two opposite directions through some sort of metabolic or chemical process. He termed these two directions of change assimilation and dissimilation. In his view the three visual substances were black—white, red-green, and yellow-
VISION: Color Vision and Color Blindness Table I VISUAL SUBSTANCE
DIRECTION OF CHANGE
White-black
Red—green
Assimilation
Black
Green
Blue
Dissimilation
White
Red
Yellow
Yellow—blue
blue, and the color a person saw depended on the way in which a particular substance was responding. Table 1 presents the fundamental color sensations as Hering conceived of them. Color sensations other than these, he argued, are produced from mixtures of these fundamental six in various proportions. The Hering, or opponentprocess, theory has also had numerous staunch supporters through the years [see HERING; see also, for example, Hurvich & Jameson 1957]. Evaluation and problems. The Young-Helmholtz and Hering theories of color vision, or some variations of them, have been the two most prominent ones in the history of color vision, and they have largely dominated thinking and research in this area for the past century or more. However, the complexities of the visual system have always intrigued theoretically inclined scientists, and literally scores of other theories have been seriously proposed from time to time. None of these alternatives has really stood the test of time. For a brief summary of some other color-vision theories see Hartridge (1950) and Judd (1951). For years it has been a disconcerting source of embarrassment to all color-vision theories that anatomical and physiological investigations failed to disclose the different kinds of cones that most of them hypothesize. The experimental procedures necessary to show the existence of different kinds of cones is conceptually simple but practically difficult, primarily because of the extremely small size of a cone (from 0.002 to 0.009 mm. in diameter) and the almost immeasurably small amount of pigment contained in each one. Further, to measure the absorption spectrum of the pigment in a single cone requires using a light so small and an intensity so low that random variations in the output of the light itself constitute a significant source of error. These and other technical difficulties have been surmounted only within recent years. Empirical support. The year 1964 was an exciting one for color-vision theory, possibly one of the most significant years of the past century in this respect. Early that year, Marks, Dobelle, and MacNichol (1964), using extremely sophisticated apparatus, reported that they had examined single parafoveal cones from human and monkey retinas and found three types of receptors with maximum
331
absorption in the yellow, green, and violet regions of the spectrum. The absorption spectra of the cones they found are strikingly similar to the sensitivities that have been postulated for the three receptors in some forms of the Young-Helmholtz theory. These findings were confirmed almost simultaneously by Brown and Wald (1964). Although much more work still needs to be done, there is at last direct and unequivocal evidence that primate color vision is mediated by at least three (and perhaps only three) different kinds of cones, each containing photopigments sensitive to different regions of the spectrum. In order for us to see color, the differential responses of the cones to stimuli of various wave lengths must somehow be preserved in the inner nervous pathways of the optic system. Less is known about the functioning of these nerve pathways than is known about the ultimate receiving elements themselves, the rods and cones. Recent research, however, has done much to clarify the behavior of the ganglion cells, the so-called thirdorder neurons, two steps behind the receptor cells in the visual system. These are particularly important for any theory of color vision because it is from the ganglion cells that optic nerve fibers go to the brain. Anatomical studies show that ganglion cells may collect information from single cones (primarily in the fovea), from several rods, or from groups of rods and cones. Because of these intricate connections, we might expect that the ganglion cells would exhibit a more complex type of response than do single rods and cones. Electrophysiological studies confirm this suspicion. Microelectrode studies of individual ganglion cell responses show that the same cell may be either excited or inhibited, depending on the wave length of the stimulus. Further, in some cases the same wave length of light may produce excitation at one intensity and inhibition at another intensity (MacNichol 1964). Our current thinking, therefore, is that both the Young-Helmholtz and the Hering theories of color vision are correct. The former, or some variation of it, appears to be a good description of the rods and cones. The latter, in some form or other, probably describes how the information from the rods and cones is encoded into complex on-off signals by the color-sensitive ganglion cells for transmission to higher visual centers. Even less is known about what happens in the brain than is known about the functioning of the retina, and almost anything one might say about the way in which the electrical responses of the
332
VISION: Color Vision and Color Blindness White
retina are transformed eventually into color experience is largely conjectural at this time. Color and color phenomena The definition of color. The word color itself is associated with certain semantic difficulties. The term is used to refer to (a) stimuli or things, as when one speaks of the color of grass, flowers, paints, or other objects; (fr) sensations, as when one says that a color "looks red"; or (c) characteristics of light that are identified neither with radiant energy nor with sensation (Optical Society of America 1953, p. 221). Further, the layman usually divides visual sensations into two broad classes: (a) those that are black, white, or gray and (£>) those that are colored. In the technical literature, however, the word color is used as a collective name that includes not only what the ordinary person refers to as colors, such as red, green, and blue, but the series of blacks, grays, and whites as well. The former are designated chromatic colors (literally, "colored colors") and the latter achromatic colors (literally, "colorless colors"). Even many technical writers in the field are inconsistent in their use of the word color in this and other respects, sometimes using the term in its everyday common meaning, and sometimes in the more inclusive sense of the color-vision specialist. Dimensions of color sensation. Color sensations can be classified and ordered without any reference to the characteristics of the stimuli that arouse them. Many such classifications of colors according to their similarities and differences have been attempted by artists, philosophers, and scientists over the past several hundred years. As a result several systems of ordering and classifying colors are now in existence. Almost without exception all such schemata agree that some type of three-dimensional model is needed to represent adequately the full range of color sensations that the normal person experiences. Figure 1 is a diagram that is widely used by psychologists and color scientists for this purpose. Hue. Perhaps the most important of the three fundamental dimensions of color as a mental phenomenon is hue. It is the essential quality element that leads one to refer to colors by such distinctive names as red, yellow, green, blue, and violet and is what the ordinary person means when he says color. Hue sensations do not, however, occur in discrete groups. Instead they shade imperceptibly from one to another and, indeed, form a complete circle, as illustrated in Figure 1. Starting with red, for example, one can describe color sensations that
HUE
Green H*
Red
Black
Figure 1 — Schematic representation of the three dimensions of color sensation Source: Chapanis 1965, p. 329.
become progressively yellower, that is, the red first becomes orange-red, then orange, yellow-orange, and finally yellow. From yellow one can proceed by similarly continuous gradations to green, blue, violet, and back to red again. It is interesting that although the hue circle describing our sensations is complete, the hues in the visible spectrum are not. True purples and reddish purples cannot be seen in the spectrum. Most purples we see around us are made up of mixtures of waves from both the long wave-length and short wave-length ends of the spectrum. Brightness. A second dimension of color sensation is brightness, the quantitative aspect of color sensation. Two common terms that are used to refer to variations in brightness are light and dark. It is easy to imagine two colors, say green, of identical hue but differing in brightness. As with hue, however, the brightness dimension also forms a continuum, shading imperceptibly from very light to very dark hues. In technical terms brightness is
VISION: Color Vision and Color Blindness used to refer to variations in the intensity of lights, lightness to variations in the intensity of surface colors. Saturation. The third dimension of color sensation, saturation, is the most difficult of the three to explain in words alone, without reference to actual color samples. Perhaps the best way of defining saturation is to say that it is the percentage of hue in a color. In this sense, it is roughly parallel to the concept of the purity of a chemical compound or the concentration of a chemical solution. In common speech, words such as pale or deep, iveak or strong, are used to refer to variations in saturation. Light brown, for example, is a weakly saturated yellow-red of medium lightness, and moderate pink is a weakly saturated light red. In Figure 1 saturation is represented by radii originating at the center of the diagram and extending in all directions from the center. In this diagram, white, gray, and black are colors of zero saturation and no hue. The white-gray-black continuum varies only in brightness. Psychophysics of color vision. Although one can study color sensations without relating them to particular physical stimuli, it is nonetheless true that sensations of color are most consistently and readily elicited by appropriate kinds of stimuli. Variations in hue are easily obtained by varying the wave length of spectrum lights, or the dominant wave length of mixtures of wave lengths. Variations in brightness are produced readily by increasing or decreasing the amount of radiant energy in a stimulus. Variations of saturation are the direct result of mixing white or gray light in various proportions with the light of isolated wave lengths from the visible spectrum. The study of the precise relationships between color sensations and the physical stimuli that evoke them is the province of psychophysics. Decades of research have provided a number of exact psychophysical functions that are useful not only for theoretical purposes but for many practical problems involving the control, measurement, specification, and production of colors. Examples of these are curves showing (a) the relative brightness of the spectrum colors when they are equated in the amount of radiant energy they contain, (b) the sensitivity of the eye to differences in wave length throughout the visible spectrum, and (c) the sensitivity of the eye to changes in saturation. Color mixture. One of the most important of these psychophysical functions concerns color mixtures. Thomas Young, in 1801, deduced from the work of Newton that the full gamut of spectrum
333
colors could be matched with mixtures of three suitably chosen primary colors. This early finding has been refined, amplified, and quantified in curves like those shown in Figure 2. The primary colors in this illustration are monochromatic lights of 480 myu, (blue), 510 m^u (a slightly bluish green) and 600 m/x (an orange-red). These curves show, for example, that a wave length of 575 rmx, which is seen as pure yellow, can be matched by roughly equal amounts of the red and green primaries. Two supplementary points merit some clarification. First, the three primary colors, red, green, and blue, are not the same primaries used in mixing paints or pigments, usually magenta, yellow, and bluish green. The data in Figure 2 are for additive mixtures; lights are combined by adding them together in suitable proportions. Paints or pigments acquire their characteristic color by absorbing certain wave lengths. For this reason, mixing pigments is referred to as subtractive color mixing. Second, although mixtures of the three primaries can match all of the hues in the visible spectrum, they cannot match both hue and saturation. The mixtures are almost uniformly less saturated than are the spectrum colors. To achieve complete matching for both hue and saturation, the spectrum colors must usually be desaturated by the addition of one of the primaries. These appear as negative quantities in Figure 2. The facts of color mixing are of considerable theoretical and practical importance. They form the basis for one of the most popular theories of color vision, the three-receptor theory, which maintains that the normal eye contains three kinds of 12
Green
O <4 UJ
I
-4
400
500
600
700
WAVE LENGTH
Figure 2 — Relative amounts of red, green, and blue lights required in additive mixtures to match the spectrum colors Source: Evans 1948.
334
VISION: Color Vision and Color Blindness
cones, with sensitivities approximately as shown in Figure 2. In addition, the data of Figure 2 lie at the heart of one of our most important systems of color specification—the CIE (Commission Internationale de 1'ficlairage, International Commission on Illumination) system. And, finally, the facts of color mixing find practical application in the production of color photography and color television. Complementary colors. A special set of color mixtures are those involving complementary colors, first described by Newton in his Opticks in 1704. For every hue we can see there is some other hue that, mixed in the proper proportion with it, will cancel out both hues and leave only a perception of white or gray. Red, for example, mixed with the right amount of blue-green looks white. The same result occurs if we mix green and purple, or yellow and blue in the proper proportions. Complementary colors, therefore, are pairs of colors that yield white or gray when they are mixed additively. Some wave lengths (those between 492 and 568 m/x) have no complementaries within the visible spectrum; their complementaries lie in the region of the extraspectral hues. Such complementaries are real, that is, they exist in the world of real colors. They merely cannot be found in the spectrum. Afterimages and contrast. The sense of sight has associated with it a number of interesting phenomena, some of which go almost completely unnoticed by the average person. Afterimages are one of these. Stare steadily at a brightly colored object for about a half minute under ordinary illumination. Then shift your gaze to some light neutral gray surface. In a few seconds you will see an image of the object you stared at, but in its complementary color. This is a negative, or complementary, afterimage. The usual explanation for negative afterimages is that certain cones in the retina become desensitized to the stimulus color during the period of prolonged fixation. If one looks at a brightly colored object briefly, under very intense light, he will typically see a brief afterimage with approximately the same hue as the original. This is a positive, or homochromatic, afterimage. Once he has seen afterimages, the average person almost inevitably asks, "Why haven't I seen them before?" There are probably many reasons why these images so easily escape our attention. One is that we undoubtedly learn to ignore them deliberately. When we turn our eyes from one object to another, we neglect the residual imagery of the first object because it contributes nothing to our perception of the object under scrutiny at the
moment. In fact we ordinarily notice afterimages only when they are so intrusive that they cannot be ignored (as, for example, the afterimage that results from looking at the sun unintentionally). In addition, our eyes are normally in motion most of the time. They are not normally at rest long enough for strong afterimages to build up. And, finally, afterimages are usually out of focus and brief in duration. All of these factors undoubtedly contribute to the elusive character of these sensations. Another color phenomenon having much in common with afterimages is chromatic contrast enhancement, or, sometimes, simply chromatic contrast or color contrast. Chromatic contrast refers to an apparent increase in the perceptual difference between colors when they are placed next to each other. A piece of red paper on a bright green background looks much redder than it would by itself. Similarly a yellow appears yellower and a blue bluer when these colors are together than when they are separate. As these examples suggest, chromatic contrast is most pronounced for complementary or near complementary colors, although it can also be demonstrated for colors that are not complementaries. A gray patch of paper on a colored background tends to take on the hue of the complementary of the background. For example, a gray patch on a red background usually has a greenish tinge. Chromatic contrast has practical usefulness in art, architecture, interior decorating, advertising, and industry because it is an extremely effective way of accentuating objects or of making them stand out from their backgrounds. Color perception Modes of color appearance. In everyday life colors are not experienced as isolated color sensations. They appear in various contexts or settings and are identified with things—objects, surfaces, or lights. These more complex visual phenomena are referred to as color perceptions to distinguish them from the more elementary color sensations and psychophysical functions discussed immediately above. The usually accepted method of describing modes of color appearance is to refer to the actual physical conditions under which colors can be experienced. Five such modes are ordinarily distinguished by color scientists (see Table 2). Color that is perceived as belonging to a source of light, for example, the blue-white of a fluorescent tube, is referred to as color in the illuminant mode. Objects in the field of view that reflect light and cast shadows and reflecting particles in the at-
VISION: Color Vision and Color Blindness mosphere sometimes permit the identification of the color of the illumination in the field of view even when one cannot see the source of the light. Color perceived in this way appears in the illumination mode. Color that is perceived as belonging to a surface, such as the surface of a book or lemon, appears in the surface mode. Light passing through a more or less uniform and transparent substance, for example, a decanter of wine, gives rise to the perception of color in the volume mode of appearance. Finally, color is most easily perceived in the film mode by looking at an extended surface color through a small aperture in a screen. Under ordinary conditions the several modes of color appearance are each remarkably stable and consistent: surfaces are always seen as surfaces, illuminants as illuminants, and so on. Moreover, the viewing conditions that elicit the various modes of appearance are ordinarily so compelling that there is ready agreement among people about the precise nature of their color experiences. This stability makes these modes of color appearance a major factor in enabling man to respond effectively to his physical environment. On the other hand, the fact that the modes of color appearance are so dependent on viewing conditions means that sometimes very simple or even minor changes in external conditions can produce a shift from one mode to another. A simple example is the shift from a surface to a film mode, which results when one almost completely closes his eyes and allows them to defocus in looking at a surface. Examples Table 2 — Dimensions of perceived color associated with the five modes of color appearance t MODES OF APPEARANCE
DIMENSIONS H u e Saturation Brightness Lightness Duration Size Shape Location Texture Gloss (luster) Transparency Fluctuation (flicker, sparkle, glitter) Insistence Pronouncedness
Illuminant (glow) * * * * * *
Illumination Surface (fills space) (object) * * * * * * * * (*) * ( * ) *
*
(*)
(*) * * *
Volume (object) * * * * * *
*
* * * *
* * * *
* * *
* * *
* * *
Film (aperture) * * * * (*) (*> not in depth
* *
t Asterisks indicate those modes that have been established for the several dimensions; parentheses indicate those dimensions that are only weakly or doubtfully associated with certain modes. Source: Optical Society of America 1953, p. 151.
335
of shifts between other pairs of modes are described by the Optical Society of America (1953, p. 147 ff.). Attributes of color perception. Each of the principal forms of color appearance is associated with several more elementary dimensions, as shown in Table 2. Hue, saturation, and brightness (for lights) or lightness (for surface colors) have already been defined. Except for the last two, all of the terms are self-explanatory. Insistence means the impressiveness, or attention-catching power, of a perceived color; pronouncedness refers to the quality or "goodness" of a color perception, for example, the whiteness of a white or the greenness of a green. Color blindness Approximately 7 or 8 per cent of males of Caucasian stock, and about 0.5 per cent of women, are color blind to some extent. Although the defect is most often an inherited one, it may also be acquired as a concomitant of traumatic injuries to the eye or brain, certain kinds of diseases, for example, jaundice and multiple sclerosis, or as a result of the ingestion of sufficient amounts of certain drugs, for example, lead, nicotine, and alcohol. Acquired color blindness is frequently curable; inherited color blindness never is. Congenital color blindness is inherited as a sexlinked recessive characteristic, and it is this that accounts for the greater incidence of the defect among men than among women. On the average, color-blind men marrying color-normal women have color-normal children, but the daughters of such a union are "carriers" of the defect. A woman carrier who marries a color-normal man transmits the defect to half her sons. Thus the most common channel of inheritance is from grandfather to grandson through the mother. A woman can inherit color blindness if her father is color blind and her mother is a carrier. Half the daughters and sons of such a union are color blind; the other half of the daughters are carriers, while the other half of the sons are color normal. If both parents are color blind, all the children are color blind. Forms of color blindness. The term color blindness is an unfortunate and misleading one because the man in the street usually interprets it to mean that a person so affected is blind to all colors. This is a gross distortion of the facts. Color-vision scientists base the following classification of color-vision defects on color mixture data such as are shown in Figure 2. Normal trichromats. Normal trichromats have normal color vision. They need mixtures of three
336
VISION: Visual Defects
suitably chosen primaries to match all the hues of the visible spectrum, and their mixture curves do not differ significantly from those in Figure 2. Anomalous trichromats. Anomalous trichromats also need mixtures of three primaries to match all the hues of the spectrum, but they require excessive amounts of one of the primaries to achieve satisfactory matches. For this reason they are sometimes called "color weak." Anomalous trichromats are classified according to which of the three primaries they require in greater than normal amounts. The protanomalous trichromat requires red; the deuteranomalous green; and the tritanomalous blue. Anomalous trichromats have relatively mild defects, which are evident principally in their confusion of certain weakly saturated hues—the pastels and tints. Dichromats. Most color-blind people are dichromats, having two-color vision, in the sense that mixtures of only two of the primaries shown in Figure 2 are sufficient to match all the spectrum colors. Protanopes depend only on the blue and green primaries, deuteranopes on the blue and red primaries, and tritanopes on the green and red primaries. Although dichromats appreciate far fewer color differences than do the color normal, they can still make certain discriminations accurately and consistently. Monochromats. Monochromats are very rare. For them all the colors in the spectrum are exactly alike in hue, differing, if at all, in brightness only. Population differences in color blindness. Extensive color vision surveys among certain ethnic groups reveal that color blindness is decidedly less common among American Indians, Negroes, Papuans, and Fijians than among Caucasians. Various hypotheses have been advanced to account for these findings, but the data do not substantiate any particular explanation.
A. CHAPANIS [See also PERCEPTION.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
BROWN, PAUL K.; and WALD, GEORGE 1964 Visual Pigments in Single Rods and Cones of the Human Retina. Science 144:45-46, 51-52. CHAPANIS, ALPHONSE 1965 Color Names for Color Space. American Scientist 53:327-346. EVANS, RALPH M. 1948 An Introduction to Color. New York: Wiley. HARTRIDGE, HAMILTON 1949 Colours and How We See Them. London: Bell. HARTRIDGE, HAMILTON 1950 Recent Advances in the Physiology of Vision. Philadelphia: Blakiston. HURVICH, LEO M.; and JAMESON, DOROTHEA 1957 An Opponent-process Theory of Color Vision. Psychological Review 64:384-404.
JUDD, DEANE B. 1951 Basic Correlates of the Visual Stimulus. Pages 811-867 in S. S. Stevens (editor), Handbook of Experimental Psychology. New York: Wiley. LE GRAND, YVES (1948)1957 Light, Colour and Vision. New York: Wiley. -> A translation of Lumiere et couleurs, first published as Volume 2 of Optique physiologique. MACNICHOL, EDWARD F. JR. 1964 Three-pigment Color Vision. Scientific American 211, no. 6:48-56. MARKS, W. B.; DOBELLE, W. H.; and MACNICHOL, E. F. JR. 1964 Visual Pigments of Single Primate Cones. Science 143:1181-1183. OPTICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA, COMMITTEE ON COLORIMETRY 1953 The Science of Color. New York: Crowell. PICKFORD, RALPH W. 1951 Individual Differences in Colour Vision. London: Routledge. WRIGHT, WILLIAM D. 1946 Researches on Normal and Defective Colour Vision. London: Kimpton. IV VISUAL DEFECTS
A visual defect may be defined as any condition that reduces the effective functioning of the eyes to a level below what is considered normal. Visual acuity. Acuity of vision, the ability to distinguish aspects of the visual field, is usually tested by means of alphabet letters or other visual stimuli that are graduated in size. The usual scale takes as its standard the minimum size of symbol that can normally be correctly perceived at a distance of 20 feet and uses this as the numerator of a fraction whose denominator indicates the minimum size of symbol that the person tested is able to distinguish at 20 feet. Thus, the fraction representing normal vision is 20/20; the fraction 20/40 means that the person can distinguish only at 20 feet what a person of normal vision can distinguish at 40 feet. Degrees of defect in acuity. Acuity of 20/30 is borderline; it is considered a defect for some purposes but is frequently ignored by eye specialists, especially in young children. Acuity of 20/40 or worse is considered a definite handicap that should be corrected. Since many severe defects of acuity can be corrected by the use of eyeglasses to produce 20/20 acuity, in practical situations attention is usually paid to the best acuity that the individual can attain with correction. Children whose acuity is 20/70 or less in the better eye after all necessary medical or surgical treatment and compensating lenses have been provided are considered eligible for placement in special "sight-saving" classes. With modern corrective aids such as telescopic, microscopic, and aspherical lenses, some people who fall within the usually accepted definition of blindness (20/200 acuity or less in the better eye
VISION: Visual Defects with correction) are still able to read, work, and move about without assistance. Types of visual defects Defects due to eyeball structure. The three most common visual defects are myopia (nearsightedness), hypermetropia (farsightedness), and astigmatism. These are all due usually to variations from the normal shape of the eyeball. Myopia. Myopia usually occurs when the eyeball is too long, so that light rays from a distant object focus before reaching the retina, thus blurring the retinal image. Light from a near object focuses at the retina or close to it, so that acuity in near vision may be normal or close to normal, while distance acuity without correction may be 20/200 or worse. Many cases of myopia are progressive during childhood but stabilize during adolescence. Properly fitted lenses can give normal acuity in distance vision to most myopic people. Hypermetropia. Hypermetropia usually results when the eyeball is too short, so that light, especially when coming from a source near the eye, focuses behind the retina, with the result that, again, the retinal image is blurred. With moderate degrees of hypermetropia, distance acuity is often normal and sometimes superior. In near vision, moderate degrees of hypermetropia tend to result in extra accommodation of the shape of the lens, thus producing normal or near normal acuity. However, since this places an extra strain on eye muscles, the farsighted person tends to suffer from eyestrain, headaches, and discomfort when he pays attention to near objects for a long time, as in reading. Astigmatism. Astigmatism tends to result from uneven curvature of the front part of the eye (in the cornea, the lens, or both), so that light rays coming into the eye are not evenly distributed over the retina. Thus, the intensity of light along a certain line (vertical, horizontal, or at an angle) may be increased, while light along other slopes is diminished. This produces an effect of irregularity in the images of objects, with apparent changes of shape or brightness as the angle from which they are observed changes. Uncorrected astigmatism frequently produces symptoms of eyestrain and discomfort. Myopia, hypermetropia, and astigmatism can usually be corrected by properly prescribed and fitted lenses. Myopia requires a biconcave, or "minus," correction. Hypermetropia requires a convex, or "plus," correction. The strength of the correction is expressed in diopters. Astigmatism requires an aspherical lens to compensate for the distortion.
337
Presbyopia and amblyopia. Presbyopia is a condition that results from the gradual loss of elasticity in the lens of the eye, so that accommodation of the lens for near vision becomes progressively less effective. The result is deficient acuity in near vision. This condition usually becomes noticeable between the ages of 40 and 50. A plus correction, in the form of either reading glasses or bifocals, is required. For myopic people who develop presbyopia, the correction may be a reduction in the strength of their minus correction. Since astigmatism often occurs together with myopia, hypermetropia, or presbyopia, the lenses needed to correct for these combinations must combine the properties needed for each of the defects separately. Amblyopia is a defect of acuity for which no structural deviation in the shape of the eye can be discovered. It is usually not improved by the use of glasses. It can be caused by deterioration or defect in the retina or in the optic nerve. Amblyopia may range in severity from a very mild diminution of acuity to near blindness. It is important to note that the same degree of acuity defect may be present in amblyopia as in myopia or in hypermetropia; while it is usually not correctable in amblyopia, it is completely or at least partially correctable in the other two conditions. Amblyopia that results from suppression or disuse of one eye, which occurs in many cases of strabismus and heterophoria (see below), can often be arrested or improved by such measures as covering the preferred eye with a patch or by placing a frosted lens before it, thus forcing use of the suppressed eye. Defects in eye coordination. In order to produce clear vision the eyes have to make four major types of adjustments. Pupillary reflex. The pupillary reflex is the automatic adjustment of the size of the pupil to the intensity of illumination. By diminishing the size of the pupil, it protects the interior of the eye against very bright light; in dim lighting, it provides a relatively large opening of the pupil. Sluggishness, irregularity, or absence of the pupillary reflex may indicate a neurological condition or a temporary effect of drugs. Accommodation reflex. The accommodation reflex is the automatic adjustment of the shape of the lens to the distance of the visual target. This adjustment is controlled by varying tension in the circular muscle that surrounds the lens. As mentioned above, the extra need for accommodation when the hypermetropic person looks at near objects tends to produce eyestrain. The diminishing
338
VISION: Visual Defects
power of accommodation with increasing age is the cause of presbyopia. Convergence reflex. The convergence reflex is the automatic control of the degree to which the eyes turn in so that both focus on the same target. The eyes are practically parallel when viewing an object more than ten feet away, but they turn in considerably when aimed at a very near target. Nystagmus. A fourth adjustment is necessary to ensure that the object being observed is at the center of the visual field, where acuity is greatest. Observation of a slowly moving object requires smooth, continuous movements adjusted to the speed and direction of the target. Observation of the details of a stationary object, as in reading, requires that the eyes alternate between pauses (fixations) and quick, jerky movements (saccadic movements). Observation of a rapidly moving object involves a combination of saccadic movements and slower pursuit movements. Nystagmus is the technical term for this alternation of fixations or slow pursuit movements and saccadic movements. It is normal in reading and when watching a rapidly moving object. Chronic nystagmus is a condition, usually congenital, in which saccadic movements occur constantly. Visual fusion. Visual fusion is the combining into a single perception of the slightly different images sent to the brain by each eye. In normal fusion both accommodation and convergence are properly adjusted to the target. Fusion difficulty may result when acuity in the two eyes is quite unequal or when either accommodation or convergence is inaccurate. It is often associated with a lack of proper balance between the six pairs of eye muscles that turn the eyeballs. When fusion fails to occur, the person may see double; more commonly, the image from one eye is ignored or suppressed. Continuing suppression of one eye over a period of years may result in amblyopia in that eye, and this condition may progress to blindness. The person who comes to depend entirely on his preferred eye is usually not aware of his lack of fusion and may achieve normal acuity with the one eye. Partial, incomplete, or slow fusion is more likely to interfere with efficient two-eyed vision than a complete absence of fusion, since the resulting visual image is blurred and somewhat variable. This is most likely to interfere with activities requiring rapid, precise focusing, such as reading or following a rapidly moving object, such as a baseball. Strabismus. Strabismus (often referred to as cross-eyedness or squint) is a condition in which
there is a marked deviation of one eye from the line of sight. When the deviant eye turns toward the nose, the condition is called internal, or convergent, strabismus. When the eye turns away from the nose, it is called external, or divergent, strabismus. In alternating strabismus, the eyes take turns in focusing on and turning away from the target, and both maintain their acuity. When the same eye turns away consistently, a progressive amblyopia may develop. In most cases of strabismus, surgical correction of inequalities in the eye muscles is necessary. Nonsurgical treatment may include covering the stronger eye with a patch part of the time, using lenses with a prismatic correction, and using a graded series of orthoptic exercises. Heterophoria. Heterophoria is a mild lack of balance between the eye muscles, usually not noticeable to the ordinary observer, in which one eye deviates sufficiently from the line of sight to produce some fusion difficulty. The deviation may be inward (esophoria), outward (exophoria), or in the vertical plane (hyperphoria). As with strabismus, one eye may deviate consistently or the two eyes may alternate. There may be double vision, temporary clearing and blurring of vision, or clear vision with suppression of the deviating eye and possible development of amblyopia. Nonsurgical treatment is more often prescribed for cases of heterophoria than for cases of strabismus. Weakness in the perception of the third dimension (called astereopsis) is closely associated with fusion difficulties. One of the main cues used in the perception of distance and depth is the slight disparity of the images obtained when the two eyes focus on the same target and these images are fused in the brain. The same principle operates in creating the illusion of depth in stereoscopic pictures. People who lack depth perception may experience difficulty in tasks requiring accurate hand-eye coordination, in sports, and in driving cars. Color blindness. Color blindness refers to difficulty in distinguishing between colors on the part of people who have no difficulty in seeing shapes and forms and can distinguish between shades of gray. Total color blindness is quite rare. Much more common (occurring in 4 to 8 per cent of males) is partial color blindness, involving difficulty in distinguishing certain reds and greens from each other and from gray. In most cases this is a weakness of color vision rather than a total absence of it; strong reds and greens may be perceived, while weaker hues may be indistinguishable from gray. Individuals with a weakness of
VISION: Visual Defects color vision may live for many years without being aware of the defect. One of the social consequences of awareness of the prevalence of partial color blindness has been the adoption of traffic-signal colors in which there is enough yellow in the red and enough blue in the green to allow the partially color-blind to distinguish between them. There is no known treatment for color blindness. Night blindness. Night blindness involves slowness in adapting to a low level of illumination. This is particularly troublesome in night driving, as the person with this condition tends to be dazzled by the headlights of oncoming cars and recovers acuity of night vision quite slowly. The condition is thought to be related to a deficiency in the visual purple, a photosensitive substance in the retina, and this in turn may be related to a vitamin A deficiency. Defects caused by injury or disease. Gradually decreasing acuity may result from a number of progressive eye conditions that, if unchecked, may lead to blindness. A cataract, for example, may involve a gradually increasing opacity of the lens of the eye over a period of many years. A cataract may result from mechanical injury, chemical poisoning, dietary deficiencies, or advancing age. Similarly, the gradually increasing visual defect accompanying the early stages of glaucoma may not be identified as such by the patient. Scarring of the cornea due to injury or penetration by foreign objects may cause more or less complete clouding of vision; in some cases surgical replacement of the clouded portion with a transplant of clear corneal tissue from a donor is possible (Berens 1960). Implications of visual defects Educational significance. Children whose corrected vision falls below 20/70 in the better eye generally need special educational aids. Sightconservation classes provide these children with materials printed in large type, special typewriters, magnifiers, and other aids that enable them to utilize the limited vision they have. With modern magnifying lenses, many children who previously would have been limited to reading Braille can now learn to read regular print. Use of existing vision is encouraged. So far as possible, these children share activities with children who have normal vision. About 1 child in 500 needs sight conservation help in school (National Society . . . 1961; Hathaway 1943). Lesser degrees of visual defect may also have a significant bearing on success and adjustment in school, particularly with regard to reading and
339
to studies dependent upon reading. A great deal of research has been done on the relation of visual defects to success in learning to read. In general, poor readers are more likely to be hypermetropic than are good readers; myopia is of little significance in the causation of reading problems. Visual conditions that are most significant for reading are eye coordination difficulties involving depth perception, fusion, and lateral eye-muscle balance (Eames 1959; Harris 1961a; I96lb- Robinson 1958). These problems suggest the possibility of inadequacy in the neurological controls of the eye. Occupational significance. Since World War n many studies have been made of the relationship between visual defects and industrial accidents. In general, it has been found that many workers have eye defects that either are not corrected at all or are corrected with inadequate or outdated lenses; in one plant, 53.7 per cent of all employees were found to be below the visual standards desirable for their jobs (Potter 1958). In addition to detecting defects and securing the best possible corrections, a visual-safety program requires visual-safety equipment in many kinds of jobs— equipment such as side shields and goggles to protect the eyes from splinters or abrasive dust, and absorptive lenses for those exposed to intense light and heat, such as furnacemen. The effectiveness of visual-safety equipment is demonstrated in a report from a large company which revealed that over a ten-year period eye injuries decreased 90 per cent, time lost dropped from 699 days to 22 days, and an estimated 82 eyes were saved from blindness (Sager 1954). Another aspect of industrial vision work is the use of vision tests in job placement. Minimum visual standards have been worked out for many specialized occupations, and efficiency is increased when this factor is taken into account in personnel placement. Visual screening tests The most common type of test for visual acuity is the Snellen chart, in which lines of alphabet letters are printed in a variety of sizes to provide indications of acuity ranging from superior (20/16 or better), through normal (20/20), to severe defect (20/200). The Snellen chart is used at the standard distance of 20 feet, and each eye is tested separately. Several modifications not requiring knowledge of the alphabet are available for testing illiterates and young children—for example, an E chart, which requires distinguishing the direction in which the lines of the E are pointing.
340
VITAL STATISTICS
A growing recognition of the limited testing possible with the Snellen-chart type of test has led to the development of several instruments to be used by nonmedical personnel to detect a range of eye defects and to refer the person tested for professional eye examinations. The Snellen chart tests only for acuity in distance vision. The newer visual-screening tests measure acuity in both distance and near vision and also include tests of eye-muscle balance, fusion, depth perception, and color perception (Imus 1949). The use of such instruments in schools and industry can significantly improve the effectiveness of the program for detecting and correcting visual defects. ALBERT J. HARRIS [See also BLINDNESS and READING DISABILITIES.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
BERENS, CONRAD 1960 Prevention of Blindness: An Appraisal of Progress and Critical Needs. Sight-saving Review 30:132-138. DUFFY, JOHN L. 1962 Saving Eyes and Dollars at Charlestown Naval Shipyard. Sight-saving Review 32:16-19. EAMES, THOMAS H. 1959 Visual Handicaps to Reading. Journal of Education 141:1-35. HARRIS, ALBERT J. 1961a How to Increase Reading Ability: A Guide to Developmental and Remedial Methods. 4th ed., rev. New York: McKay. -» First published in 1940 by Longmans. HARRIS, ALBERT J. 1961& Perceptual Difficulties in Reading. Volume 6, pages 282-290 in International Reading Association Conference, Proceedings. Edited by J. Allen Figurel. New York: Scholastic Magazines. -> Each volume has a different title. Volume 6: Changing Concepts of Reading Instruction. HATHAWAY, WINIFRED (1943) 1959 Education and Health of the Partially Seeing Child. 4th ed., rev. Published for the National Society for the Prevention of Blindness. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. IMUS, HENRY A. 1949 Testing Vision in Industry. Volume 53, pages 266-274 in American Academy of Ophthalmology and Oto-laryngology, Transactions. Rochester, Minn.: The Academy. LOWENFELD, BERTHOLD 1955 Psychological Problems of Children With Impaired Vision. Pages 214-283 in William M. Cruickshank (editor), Psychology of Exceptional Children and Youth. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. MORGAN, W. GREGORY; and STUMP, M. FRANK 1949 Benefits From Professional Eye Care for Workers With Lowered Visual Performance. Volume 54, pages 99105 in American Academy of Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology, Transactions. Rochester, Minn.: The Academy. NATIONAL SOCIETY FOR THE PREVENTION OF BLINDNESS, ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION OF PARTIALLY SEEING CHILDREN 1961 Helping the Partially Seeing Child in the Regular Classroom. Sight-saving Review 31:170-177. POTTER, J. A. 1958 Seeing Eyes on the Job. National Safety Nexus 78:44, 125-126.
ROBINSON, HELEN M. 1958 The Findings of Research on Visual Difficulties and Reading. Volume 3, pages 107-111 in International Reading Association Conference, Proceedings. Edited by J. Allen Figurel. New York: Scholastic Magazines. -» Each volume has a different title. Volume 3: Reading for Effective Living. SAGER, HERMAN 1954 Protection -f- Correction. National Safety News 70:28-29, 88-91.
VITAL STATISTICS Vital statistics are statistics on principal events in the life of an individual. They usually are gathered at the time of an event such as birth, marriage, the dissolution of a marriage, and death. Vital statistics are commonly compiled from records of vital events registered through offices that are organized as part of a vital registration system. Vital registration systems are generally organized units of government. They presuppose a wellestablished civil administrative organization with trained officials and, most usually, local offices as well as a central one. Local offices are primarily responsible for the collection of information, while both local and central offices process the information for statistical purposes. Local offices are generally responsible for maintaining a legally valid record of the vital events. Thus they are useful to the inhabitants of the population when it becomes necessary to prove a vital event such as birth, nationality, descent, or relationship by marriage. The information-processing offices that provide vital statistics in summary form are charged with this responsibility in the interest of the formation of public policy. [See GOVERNMENT STATISTICS.] The most accurate vital statistics are found in countries that are in an advanced state of economic development; in many of the less developed countries vital registration is still rudimentary, partial, or inaccurate. In order to be complete and reliable, vital registration must be compulsory, i.e., the law must place an obligation on defined classes of persons to notify the registering official of the occurrence of a vital event. This is usually easiest in the case of marriage, which in most countries involves a ceremony before an official of the state or the church, who will record the event, which confers a new status on the spouses. In those countries in which consensual unions are common, however, marriage statistics may give an incomplete count of the number of women who are exposed to a relatively high risk of pregnancy. Furthermore, death registration may be easier to enforce than birth registration, since the disposal of a human body is normally subject to police or
VITAL STATISTICS sanitary regulations, which require a certificate of registration of death to be produced before the body can be disposed of. History of vital registration. Vital registration was often preceded by parochial registration of baptisms, burials, and marriages. Parochial registration, however, tends to be incomplete, particularly in the case of births, since not all children who are born are baptized; in particular, the practice relating to the registration of babies who die before baptism may vary in different parishes. In Scandinavia, the work of registration is still carried out by the clergy, although they act as agents of the state. The oldest systems of vital registration are found in the Scandinavian countries: Finland started in 1628 and Denmark in 1646, Norway and Sweden following in 1685 and 1686 respectively. In America, the General Court in Boston enacted a registration law for the colony of Massachusetts in 1639 which stated "that there be records kept . . . of the days of every marriage, birth and death of every person within this jurisdiction." In 1644 an explicit obligation was placed on "all parents, masters of servants, executors and administrators . . . to bring unto the clerk of the writs the names of such belonging to them, as shall either be born or die." The law was tightened in 1692, when penalty clauses for failure to register were reinforced, but the system remained incomplete until the nineteenth century (Gutman 1959). In England and Wales parochial registration of baptisms and burials began as early as 1538. John Graunt, who is generally considered the father of modern demography, utilized these data in his work Natural and Political Observations Made Upon the Bills of Mortality, which was first published in 1662. An act passed in 1694 provided for the registration of births and deaths throughout the country, but it was in force for only ten years and few of the returns made under its provisions have been located. Estimates of population in England and Wales in the eighteenth century have to be based on the parochial registers, since the system of civil registration was not established until 1836. Even then, the Births and Deaths Registration Act did not lay down any penalties for failure to comply with its provision, an omission that was not repaired until 1874. In other European countries vital registration was gradually introduced throughout the nineteenth century, and was complete in most areas by the beginning of the twentieth century. In some states, however, compulsory and complete regis-
3 41
tration was introduced very much later; in Poland, for example, it was not introduced until 1946. In Russia, vital registration was in the hands of the ecclesiastical authorities before the revolution and was only transferred to the civil power afterwards. A registration area was built up, and by 1926 it was working with reasonable efficiency in European Russia. It has gradually been extended to cover the rest of the Soviet Union. Outside Europe, North America, and Australia, registration is more recent. Japan, the most industrialized and developed country of Asia, introduced a modern registration law in 1898, although household registers had been kept before that date. In India and Pakistan no complete and compulsory system of vital registration exists at present, although partial and incomplete systems operate in a number of areas. In Africa the position is even less satisfactory. Birth and death registration in colonial days was applied only to the population of European, and sometimes to that of Asian, origin; for the indigenous African population, registration operated in a few towns at the most and was often of questionable accuracy. In Latin America, although registration became compulsory in most areas in the nineteenth century, the systems were frequently lacking in accuracy and left much to be desired in other respects. In the United States vital registration developed slowly. As is the case in most federal countries, the responsibility for vital registration lies with the individual states and not with the federal government. By 1859 eight states had established registration systems, and the progress was resumed after the Civil War. The federal government's influence made itself felt after 1902, when the Bureau of the Census was established as a permanent organization. In 1903 Congress passed a law stressing the importance of a unified system of registration, and model registration laws were drafted for the guidance of individual states. A death registration area and later a birth registration area were set up, admission to which depended upon the achievement of a certain degree of completeness of registration. Administration of vital registration. Systems of vital registration are normally administered through a network of local registration offices, each of which is responsible for a well-defined local area. It is often convenient to have the boundary of the registration district coincide with that of a local government unit. The onus of informing the registrar of the occurrence of a vital event is placed by law on a definite informant or a substitute when the informant is not available. In the
342
VITAL STATISTICS
case of births, the legal informant is normally the parent, although in a few countries—of which the United States is the outstanding example—responsibility rests with the attendant at the birth. Obviously, this arrangement is possible only when the vast majority of births are medically attended; and, on the whole, registration by the parent is preferred. However, the completeness of birth registration depends on other factors than the identity of the informant. In the case of a death, the obligation to register again most frequently devolves upon a relative, or, failing him, a person present at the death. In the United States and New Zealand this responsibility, however, devolves upon the undertaker who arranges for the funeral. In many of the more developed countries, the cause of death must also be stated at registration; this responsibility usually has to be carried out by a medical practitioner. Thus, in England and Wales the medical certificate of death is given by the doctor who attended the deceased before death or (in cases of sudden death) by the pathologist who conducted the autopsy. Either of these persons can notify the registrar of the death, but the obligation to register it rests with the next of kin. In the case of marriages the informants are normally the groom and bride, although in some areas it is the person solemnizing the marriage who actually registers it. The time allowed for registration in different countries varies; it is normally shorter for a death than a birth. As an extreme example, the Cuban law (as of 1950) required a death to be registered immediately, but a birth only had to be registered within a year of its occurrence. In England and Wales five days are allowed for a death registration, but 42 days for the registration of births. The form in which vital events are registered varies from country to country. As the registration system serves as the legal record of the vital event, a certificate of registration is normally issued to each informant. This may carry all the information obtained at registration, but more frequently some of the material collected is used for statistical purposes only and does not appear on the certificate. The minimum information collected at a birth is normally the date and place of its occurrence, the sex of the child, and the name of its father (in the case of a legitimate birth). In some vital statistics systems, however, a good deal of additional information is collected, e.g., the age of the mother, the occupation or age of the father, the length of the parents' marriage, how many brothers and sisters the child has, and in some cases its weight at birth. For death registration,
the name, age, and sex of the deceased person, together with the date and place of death, constitute the minimum amount of information desirable. In many vital statistics systems information is sought regarding the decedent's marital status, occupation, and cause of death. The minimum information normally required when a marriage is registered is the marital condition of the bride and groom and their ages, although often details about their occupations and sometimes the occupations of their parents are also included. There are a number of common difficulties connected with vital registration and vital statistics. In the case of death registration, there have been periodical revisions of the International List of Causes of Death. These revisions have affected the comparability of cause-specific death rates over time. Moreover, the treatment of multiple causes of death may differ in different countries, although the World Health Organization has recently made recommendations, endorsed by the Statistical Commission of the UN, for the adoption of a uniform International Medical Certificate of Death. Another difficulty lies in the definition of a live birth and in the classification of stillbirths or fetal deaths. Thus, in Belgium a child born alive but dying before registration (that is, within three days of birth) is registered as stillborn. In Colombia, stillbirths are not registrable; in Cuba, survival for at least one day is required before a birth can be registered as live. In Great Britain any child born after the twenty-eighth week of pregnancy that at any time after being expelled from its mother drew breath or showed any sign of life is regarded as liveborn. Stillbirth or fetal death rates calculated in accordance with different definitions therefore cannot be comparable. The uses of vital statistics. The information collected at vital registration is used principally in the study of population movements. Since censuses can only be taken periodically (often at decennial intervals), vital statistics serve as the principal instrument for making intercensal estimates of population. The decomposition of population growth into births, deaths, and migration is essential if its nature and causes are to be fully understood, and a k:.~wledge of mortality and fertility rates is also necessary if reasonable assumptions are to be made for projection of population trends. Historically, interest first arose in studying mortality statistics. Reference has already been made to John Graunt's pioneer study in the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, interest in accurate mortality statistics was
VITI DE MARCO, ANTONIO DE stimulated by the growth of life insurance, for which adequate data on the variation of mortality with age and sex were necessary, and by the struggle against infectious and other diseases. In this connection, special mention must be made of the work of William Farr, who entered the British General Register Office as compiler of abstracts shortly after its foundation in 1837 and who served in it until his retirement in 1880. He developed the British system of death registration into an instrument for measuring the sanitary condition of the country, and his studies on mortality differences between different occupations contributed to the understanding of industrial hazards. Farr was also one of the prime movers in making mortality statistics internationally comparable and in constructing a statistical nosology of diseases that was to be used in the study of causes of death. The International List of Causes of Death has been revised from time to time, and at present the responsibility for the list lies with the World Health Organization. Birth registrations form the basis of both fertility and natality statistics. In connection with census data on the structure of the population, they can be used to assess marital fertility and to establish fertility differences between different social groups; they may also be useful in studies on population genetics. In industrial societies, in which mortality is low, population projections will be dependent mainly on the assumptions made with respect to fertility and on the assessment of trends. Complex breakdown of births by parental age, occupation, duration of marriage, birth order, and sometimes interval since preceding birth, are required to make reasonable assumptions; and registration systems have become more complex in order that this information may be made available. Much the same considerations apply to the study of marriage statistics. EUGENE GREBENIK [See also CENSUS; FAMILY, article on DISORGANIZATION AND DISSOLUTION; FERTILITY; GOVERNMENT STATISTICS; MIGRATION; MORTALITY; NUPTIALITY; POPULATION, article on THE FIELD OF DEMOGRAPHY; PUBLIC HEALTH; SOCIOLOGY, articles on THE FIELD and On THE EARLY HISTORY OF SOCIAL RESEARCH;
and
the biographies of GRAUNT; KOROSY; LOTKA.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
BENJAMIN, BERNARD (1959) 1960 Elements of Vital Statistics. London: Allen & Unwin; Chicago: Quadrangle Books. EDGE, PERCY GRANVILLE 1944 Vital Statistics and Public Health Work in the Tropics. London: Bailliere, Tindal & Cox.
343
FARR, WILLIAM Vital Statistics: A Memorial Volume of Selections from the Writings of William Farr. Edited by Noel A. Humphreys. London: The Sanitary Institute of Great Britain, 1885. GXJTMAN, ROBERT 1959 Birth and Death Registration in Massachusetts 1639-1900. New York: Milbank Memorial Fund. -» First published in the Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly, Volume 36, 1958, and Volume 37, 1959. KOREN, JOHN (editor) 1918 The History of Statistics: Their Development and Progress in Many Countries. Published for the American Statistical Association. New York: Macmillan. KUCZYNSKI, ROBERT R. 1948-1953 Demographic Survey of the British Colonial Empire. 3 vols. Oxford Univ. Press. -» Volume 1: West Africa, 1948. Volume 2: South African High Commission Territories: East and Central Africa, Mauritius, and the Seychelles, 1949. Volume 3: West Indian and American Territories, 1953. LORIMER, FRANK 1961 Demographic Information on Tropical Africa. Boston Univ. Press. SPIEGELMAN, MORTIMER 1963 The Organization of the Vital and Health Statistics Monograph Program. Pages 230-249 in Milbank Memorial Fund, Emerging Techniques in Population Research: Proceedings of a Round Table at the Thirty-ninth Annual Conference . . . September 18-19, 1962. New York: The Fund. UNITED NATIONS, STATISTICAL OFFICE 1955 Handbook of Vital Statistics Methods. Studies in Methods, Series F, No. 7. New York: United Nations. WESTERGAARD, HARALD 1932 Contributions to the History of Statistics. London: King.
VITI DE MARCO, ANTONIO DE Antonio De Viti de Marco was born in 1858 at Casamassella, near Lecce, in Apulia, and died in Rome in 1943. After holding positions as professor of public finance in Camerino, Macerata, and Pavia, he became a professor at the University of Rome in 1887. He taught at Rome until 1931, when with 11 other professors he resigned from his chair, refusing to take an oath endorsing the education of Italian youth according to the fascist program. In his letter of resignation he declared that the freedom of thought and speech necessary to a university professor is fundamentally undermined by sworn loyalty to a political party. Three years later he resigned from the ancient Accademia dei Lincei for the same reasons; he also refused Mussolini's offer to make him a senator. He publicly thanked Ernesto Rossi for helping him with the last edition of his Principles, although Rossi had just been condemned by the fascist Peoples Court as a member of the organization Giustizia e Liberta. From 1908 to 1921 De Viti was in parliament as a member of the Radical party and was a strong opponent of the protectionist policy of the indus-
344
VITI DE MARCO, ANTONIO DE
trial north. He was active throughout his life in the interest of the Mezzogiorno, the much neglected south of Italy. In addition to his academic, scholarly, and political activities he devoted himself successfully to the administration and cultivation of his large landholdings in Apulia. Because of this combination of interests and activities, his studies of public finance were always very realistic, although they were also highly abstract and rigorous. De Viti's first work, Moneta e prezzi (1885), is a theoretical and statistical investigation of the quantity theory of money, of the international distribution of precious metals, and of the structure of interest rate differentials and their effect on lending operations. He used the quantity theory to develop a monetary theory of business cycles and measured the severity of a crisis by the loss of social capital. His fundamental work, II carattere teorico dell' economia finanziaria, appeared in 1888. It was followed by other writings, culminating in I primi principii dell' economia finanziaria (see 1923a). This work was translated into German, English, and Spanish and had an introduction by Luigi Einaudi, one of De Viti's greatest admirers. In addition De Viti wrote about the contributions to economics of Serra, Pantaleoni, and A. Messedaglia and in 1898 published a treatise on the function of banks. His political writings were collected under the title Un trentennio di lotte politiche (1894-1922'); they deal mostly with his opposition to protectionism, which he believed harmful to the interests of the agricultural south (1929). His opposition was carried on largely through the Antiprotectionist League, which he had founded. De Viti distinguished between two fundamentally different forms of organization of the state— the monopolistic state and the cooperative state— and explored their implications for taxation and public finance. In the monopolistic state, taxes are least burdensome to the privileged, feudal classes, and more power is wielded by the state itself than by private monopolies (which are checked or weakened by substitution, smuggling, and so forth); in the cooperative state, all citizens are producers and consumers of public services, and private goods are transformed into public goods. The elaboration of this distinction led De Viti to an analysis of the demand for public goods and to the recognition that not all taxes are a burden but instead can even constitute a decrease in costs, the state being able to provide some public goods more cheaply than private individuals can. De Viti's analysis of the incidence of taxation anticipated many later developments. He showed
that the "collective" wants of the community, satisfied by public goods, are not felt by any one person and are thus different from the "general" wants, which are merely wants common to many individuals. His analysis of the distribution of taxes—by comparing social benefits and individual costs and advantages—was based on the use of the principle of marginal utility. He also analyzed profoundly the problem of the limits of the public debt and showed how an "automatic amortization" of a debt (originally created by credit operations) occurs when the debt is matched by new savings. De Viti thus destroyed the idea, strongly held since Adam Smith, that states cannot carry increasing debts; owing to new savings the debts become a transitory element in the state's budget, causing taxes to be collected from one group and paid to another —the savers. De Viti favored proportional taxation, which he believed comes closest to producing a just distribution of the burden of taxation. He maintained this view in spite of his adherence to the principles of marginal utility. The flourishing of the study of public finance in Italy owed a great deal to De Viti; according to Einaudi, probably De Viti's most eminent student, anyone confronted with a question of public finance asks himself first of all, What does De Viti think about it? And elsewhere too De Viti's work contributed a great deal toward the establishment of a science of public finance. OSKAR MORGENSTERN
[Directly related are the entries DEBT, PUBLIC; PUBLIC EXPENDITURES; TAXATION. Other relevant material may be found in MONEY, article on QUANTITY THEORY,- and in the biography of EINAUDI.] WORKS BY VITI DE MARCO
1885
Moneta e prezzi ossia il principio quantitative in rapporto alia questione monetaria. Citta di Castello: Lapi. 1888 II carattere teorico dell' economia finanziaria. Rome: Pasqualucci. 1898 Saggi di economia e ftnanza. Rome: Giornale degli Economist!. (1923a) 1950 First Principles of Public Finance. London: Cape. -» First published in Italian. Originally issued in 1886-1887 as a draft of mimeographed lecture notes, then as printed lectures in 1923. The 1950 edition is based on the definitive version of the Principii published in 1934. 1923b Scienza delle finanze. Rome: Manuzio. 1925 Maffeo Pantaleoni. Giornale degli economisti e rivista di statistica 4th Series 65:165-177. 1927 Due commemorazioni: Angela Messedaglia; Maffeo Pantaleoni. Rome: Sampaolesi. 1929 Un trentennio di lotte politiche (1894-1922). Rome: Collezione Meridionale Editrice.
VOCATIONAL INTEREST TESTING 1935
La funzione della banca: Introduzione allo studio dei problemi monetdri e bancari contemporanei. Turin: Einaudi.
SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY BLACK, DUNCAN 1939 The Incidence of Income Taxes.
London: Macmillan. DEHOVE, GERARD 1946 L'oeuvre financiere d'Antonio De Viti de Marco. Revue d'economie politique 56:250-291, 436-456. FASIANI, MAURO 1932-1933 Der gegenwartige Stand der reinen Theorie der Finanzwissenschaft in Italien. Zeit-
schrift fur Nation alokonomie 3:651-691; 4:79-107, 357-388. GANGEMI, LELLO 1945 Anteguerra e dopoguerra nel pensiero di Antonio De Viti de Marco. Naples: Morano. PAPA, ANTONIO 1965 Ritratti critici di contemporanei: Antonio De Viti de Marco. Belfagor 20:188-209. Rossi, ERNESTO 1948 Antonio De Viti de Marco: Uomo civile. Bari: Laterza. STAMMATI, GAETANO 1945 In memoria di un maestro: Antonio De Viti de Marco. Economia e commercio 1, no. 4:41-46.
VOCATIONAL INTEREST TESTING Many a man finds himself at middle age fully committed to continuing until retirement in an occupation that has lost its appeal for him. His dissatisfaction is not eased when he observes the large number of persons who are delighted with their choice of occupation and who are willing to spend extra hours and excess energy in work. Counselors of young persons have sought to develop ways to increase the proportion of persons whose interests match the activities involved in their daily work. The development of measures of vocational interest has aimed at assessing the inclinations of the young person so that he may be assisted in the choice of an occupation that will sustain his interests, be personally satisfying, and keep him usefully employed throughout his working life. The most successful efforts at such assessment have involved the use of interest and/or biographical inventories. These differ only in the type of information that is obtained as a basis for measurement. The essential feature of the best of such interest measures is the use of large numbers of successful workers in each of many occupations for purposes of comparison. The young person's responses to these inventories are scored in such a way as to inform him of the degree to which his interests and preferences match those of persons in each of a number of occupations. A person who completes a vocational-interest inventory expresses preferences about items concerning a field of work or recreation or about items dealing with values, needs, or personality char-
345
acteristics. For example, he may be asked if he likes a specific activity, is indifferent to it, or dislikes it; or he may be asked to select out of three or four activities the one he likes most or likes least. Inventories of this sort are not measures of aptitude or ability. Since scores can be easily influenced by the desire of a person to make a particular impression, the preferred use of the interest inventory is in a setting where the individual considers it to his advantage to obtain the most accurate description of himself. A biographical inventory contains items related to the past activities of the individual. He may be asked to indicate whether or not he has had certain experiences or has participated in certain activities. His enumeration of these past activities reflects fundamental preferences for activities; thus the reported record will provide evidence that will be relevant to vocational choice. To enable vocational counselors to use the data obtained from these inventories, scoring keys have been devised that are based on a comparison of the responses of persons employed in a given occupation with the responses of the general population. Background and history. When asked what field of work he prefers to enter, a young person's response incorporates not only his preferences for job activities but also his understandings or misapprehensions about the nature of the employment setting, the likely economic rewards he associates with a given occupation, and the factors relating to the social prestige of various occupations. His thinking may also be colored by his perception of the likelihood of opportunities for employment in one field or another, his estimate of the educational or training requirements for a given position, and his estimate of the personal characteristics that the job requires in comparison to his estimate of his own characteristics. The development of measures of vocational interests has resulted from the need to obtain more systematic and more veridical descriptions of occupational preference than individuals can usually provide by self-report. The earliest major work in the development of vocational-interest inventories of the sort now commonly in use was that of Strong. He developed the Strong Vocational Interest Blank (SVIB), primarily for use with college students, and prepared a number of scoring keys for those occupations into which college students normally go (Strong 1943). These keys were based on the administration of the SVIB to a large number of employed workers in a variety of occupations, including medicine, dentistry, engineering, chemistry, physics, mathematics, high-
346
VOCATIONAL INTEREST TESTING
school teaching, production management, lifeinsurance sales, journalism, and advertising. Other investigators have assisted in the development of other scoring keys for the SVIB or have developed additional inventories for this purpose. The most widely used of the other instruments in the United States is the Kuder Preference Record (e.g., Kuder 1959), which can be scored for a very large number of occupations (for example, electrical engineer, farmer, newspaper editor, accountant, druggist) or for a small number of interest areas (for example, computational, persuasive, mechanical). The Minnesota Vocational Interest Inventory (MVII) is another such device, but one that aims to assist the young person primarily interested in entering the skilled trades or other occupations normally engaged in by noncollege youth (e.g., Clark & Campbell 1965). Scoring key development. The men-in-general reference group for the SVIB represents all persons employed in the occupations normally entered by college graduates. The percentage of persons in both the men-in-general group and a given occupational group who respond to each item's alternative responses is determined. Whenever men in a given occupation (the "criterion group") respond much more frequently to a given alternative than do men in general (the "reference group"), that response is given a positive scoring weight. When the response by the criterion group is much less frequent than for the reference group, that response is given a negative scoring weight. The summation of the scoring weights obtained by an individual who has completed the inventory is his score on that particular key. Persons who complete the inventory, therefore, are able to determine the degree to which their interests are like those of persons in a variety of occupations by having their inventories scored with the keys of a large number of groups. Obviously such scoring is laborious. Normally it is done by machine at centers established in various parts of the United States. There is thus available to an individual who completes an interest inventory a substantial amount of information beyond that which he previously had. He can be led to think about the world of work in terms of the presumed activities of a variety of specific occupations, since these constitute many of the items to which he has responded, and he can learn the degree to which his responses are like those of persons in various occupational groups. In addition, he can learn something about the degree of disparity between his interests and those of certain groups, for the scores on the interest inventory not only identify the occupations that
attract persons like himself but also those occupations that attract persons markedly different from himself. The task of developing scoring keys of the sort just described is enormous. The cooperation of large numbers of employed persons is required. The development of appropriate items that will differentiate such occupations requires a careful prior examination of the characteristics of the world of work. One might ask whether the same results might not be achieved by having persons well acquainted with the world of work make their own assessment of the way in which interest inventories ought to be scored. Such efforts have been made. Inventories developed with scoring keys based on the obvious content of items and employing the judgments of experts for scoring are enormously inferior to those having scoring keys developed by the more systematic approach. An alternative, however, is to develop a key that describes the essential dimensions of vocational interests within a given individual. A measure of the degree of interest in mechanical things, for example, can be obtained by examining the way in which responses of an individual cluster into patterns. This sort of analysis of inventory responses has been attempted and has resulted in the use of scoring keys that are not occupational keys but keys measuring areas of interest. Inventories using such scores have the advantages of requiring a smaller number of keys and of being easier to score. They are harder to interpret, for they do not provide extensive information about the nature of interests of employed persons. However, the individual does have the opportunity to see himself described according to meaningful measures in comparison with other persons of his own age or status, so that he may see whether he exceeds them in terms of interest in various areas. If he then also has the opportunity to compare his scores with the average scores of persons employed in a wide variety of occupations, he may make an assessment of his likelihood of success or his likelihood of happiness in a given field. Reliability and validity. Scores on interest inventories can be used for counseling only if we can be sure that they are stable over time and are related to other variables associated with occupational choice. The reliability of scores of vocationalinterest measures is high, whether estimated by internal consistency or by test-retest. When inventories are administered with a short time lapse, the reported correlations between scores usually ratnge between .80 and .95. Strong administered a retest
VOCATIONAL INTEREST TESTING of his inventory to a sample of graduates of Stanford University who had taken it as seniors 18 years before. He reported (1955) correlations that are almost as high (an average of .69) as those that have been obtained between intelligence test scores over the same interval of time. Reliabilities estimated on the basis of item intercorrelations, or internal consistency, have a high degree of association with the number of items used in the scoring process. These estimates, however, are also uniformly high for most of the commonly used inventories and scoring keys [see PSYCHOMETRICS]. There are a variety of ways of estimating the validity of interest measures. One obvious method is to examine the degree to which the distributions of scores made by workers employed in different fields compare with each other. A variety of investigations have demonstrated that the degree of separation between occupational groups that is possible using the scoring keys of the most commonly used instruments is very great. In a typical comparison of two obviously dissimilar occupations one will find less than 5 per cent of persons in one occupation exceeding the average score obtained by workers in the second occupation when the two groups are scored on the key for the second occupation. It is characteristic of measures that tap intellectual functions that the average intercorrelation of scores on a test battery is moderately positive and that negative correlations between measures are rare. This is not so for vocational interests. Very large negative correlations are obtained between scoring keys for occupations that are obviously different. Accountants and artists, for example, obtain very low scores on each other's keys (Strong 1943); the correlation of the two keys is a high negative one (-.74). Vocational-interest measures routinely show correlations very near zero with measures of intellectual functions, even when the latter are aptitude measures presumably related to success in the relevant occupation. This lack of relationship makes vocational-interest measures particularly useful in prediction because they add unique variance. This lack of correlation, however, also requires that caution be exercised in the interpretation of interest measures, for they cannot be treated as reflections of unobserved capabilities of the individual, but rather must be treated as reflections of inclinations or preferences that have no systematic relationship to combinations of aptitudes. Longitudinal studies. Another method for estimating the meaning of vocational interest is to inquire about the likelihood of a person's persist-
347
ing in an occupation when his interest score is high as against the likelihood of his persisting in the occupation when his score is low. The most spectacular findings in this regard have been obtained by Strong in his 18-year follow-up study. He found that the likelihood of persistence in an occupation was markedly enhanced when a person's interests were consonant with those of workers in that occupation. A similar study by Campbell indicated that students whose measured interests were similar to those of life-insurance salesmen were much more likely to enter a field related to selling than were their fellow students; his study was a long-term follow-up of students in the state of Minnesota who had completed the SVIB as high school seniors (1966a). The stability of interests. The use of the comparison of occupational groups in the development of scoring keys rests on the assumption that occupational interests do not change with age and that the interests of a particular occupational group do not change over time. Both of these assumptions require testing. The first requires the administration of inventories to individuals at varying ages in order to see the degree to which their scores change. A variety of studies of this sort have been completed but have not yet been published. They lead to the generalization that students of college age as well as those in the llth and 12th grades of high school have interests that are sufficiently mature and that have stabilized enough to be generally useful for prediction of later scores. At the 9th and 10th grade levels some young persons have achieved a maturation of interests sufficient to enable prediction of their scores at later times, but others have not. Unfortunately there is no certain way to identify those persons for whom interest measurements are appropriate and those who are not adequately mature, although undoubtedly many signs of immaturity may be used. These studies have demonstrated that the interests of persons in general move from an emphasis on the natural sciences toward social service and the social sciences during the period from early high school to the late college years. The second assumption deals with change in the occupational interests of a group over a period of time. Some occupations certainly change: the airline pilot of today is a different sort of person from the aviator of World War i, and the physician of today is surely not the same as the general practitioner of thirty years ago. To what extent do changes in the nature of an occupation determine who enters that occupation? What basis do we have for estimating that a person today should enter
348
VOCATIONAL INTEREST TESTING
an occupation when data used are based on a preceding generation? The most interesting study that bears on this question has been done by Campbell (1966b). Using Strong's SVIB data on employees of the Federal Reserve System in the state of Minnesota in the early 1930s and comparing these scores with those of incumbents 35 years later, Campbell found that the profile of interests of the current group, in spite of the fact that the banking profession has ostensibly changed greatly in its attitudes and practices, was nonetheless almost identical to that obtained on the prior sample. Thus there is convincing evidence for this occupation of an astonishing consistency in the sorts of persons who are attracted into key positions. Further studies of this sort with other changing occupations are obviously required before we may make any general statement about the effects of change in the world of work. Use of vocational-interest measures. Vocationalinterest measures are not developed primarily for the purpose of predicting achievement; indeed, they do not predict achievement particularly well. This may be owing in part to the fact that achievement is normally measured in a school setting, where ability is a much more important variable than interest or inclination. In settings where the training situation is such that inclination is much more important, there may be some use for these measures. Clark, in a study using the MVII in a U.S. Navy technical school, found that persons of marginal abilities with high interest scores would achieve very well, whereas persons of marginal abilities with low interest scores would achieve quite poorly (1961). Studies with the SVIB in attempts to predict achievement in medical schools have not been so successful, perhaps because they enroll few students with marginal ability. [See ACHIEVEMENT TESTING.] Interest measures are intended, however, to predict the degree to which a person would find various sorts of work satisfying. If he selects an occupation that matches his interest scores, the likelihood that he will remain in it should increase. Studies of occupational satisfaction, however, have not given a great deal of support to this position. This may be due to the fact that occupational satisfaction has a number of dimensions, some of which are specific to particular jobs and some of which are specific to the occupation itself. It may also be, however, that satisfaction itself is not readily predictable and that whatever factors produce high degrees of satisfaction or low degrees of satisfaction as reported by individuals are not factors relating to the pleasure that a person gets from
the activities that are specific to the occupation. Recent studies of the different factors producing satisfaction and dissatisfaction in work settings may yield light on this matter. As reported earlier, however, it is possible to predict whether a person will stay in an occupation. That a person's occupational choice can be predicted by interest measures, at least to some extent, supports the point that occupational choice reflects important characteristics of the person and of his perception of himself. Yet many jobs are considered as forms of employment to which many unfortunate persons are relegated because they are incapable of making any other contribution to society. Rewards in such occupations are presumed to be solely in wages and in the end of the work, which comes each day and each week. To what extent are choices of such occupations related to individual characteristics, and to what extent are they forced upon an individual as a result of his lack of capability for anything better? This question is fundamental to a decision about the degree to which it is appropriate to use vocational-interest measures with persons below the professional and skilled-trades occupational groups. Darley and Hagenah conclude that the unskilled occupations and the more routine occupations provide no basis for differentiation on the basis of vocational interests (1941). Clark reports, however, that men enlisted in the navy, where one would not expect much opportunity for individual preference to affect assignment, do sort themselves out into various navy rating groups in ways that are related to their measured interest patterns. This was found to be true even when these measured interest patterns were unknown either to the men involved or to the persons who were influencing their classification and assignment. Clark's work with skilled tradesmen and with retail salesclerks, warehouse men, milk-wagon drivers, and the like also demonstrated that these groups are fully as easily differentiated from each other on the basis of their measured interest patterns as are professional workers (1961). Thus it would appear that for a substantial portion of the work force, choices of occupation are made in the light of preferences for activity and of individual characteristics that are differentially suited to given fields. These findings, however, are not contradictory to the generalization stated by Darley and Hagenah. The average intelligence of many of the groups with which Clark worked was above that of the general population. There are many occupational groups normally not thought of as professional or highly technical that attract persons of intelligence
VOCATIONAL INTEREST TESTING and presumably provide sufficient gratification and stimulation to lead them to persist in the occupation. For such groups, interest measures can be and have been developed and used. As yet, no such measures have been developed for the less intellectually attractive occupations. The use of vocational-interest measures in studying occupational choice and the world of work does permit some better understanding of how the world of work is sorted out in terms of individual characteristics. Earlier mention was made of the development of one type of scoring key by comparing occupational groups and of a different type of scoring key by studying the ways in which item responses of individuals correlate with each other. One would expect, if the world of work were divided in some rational manner related to the capabilities and motivations of persons, that these two sets of scores would have substantial correlations with each other. Helen Gee and W. T. Norman (see Clark 1961) developed a set of homogeneous keys for the MVII without reference to item content and found that these keys had highly orderly and meaningful relationships with empirical keys developed on the MVII by Clark. The fact that these relationships turned out to be highly orderly was directly a result of ignoring item content. When item content is used to determine the choice of items to be scored in homogeneous keys, this orderliness does not appear. This observation should make it clear that the field-of-interest measurement has not yet developed to a point where it is possible to identify and understand the major components of variance in interest scores and to relate these to our knowledge of the content of occupations and to other measures of psychological characteristics. Ultimately such orderly relationships should become known. The nature of interest. What aspects of personality are being measured when interest inventories are used? Are these characteristics essentially inborn, or are they resultants of varieties of successful and unsuccessful experiences during youth? Information currently available is far from adequate but suggests that interests are acquired and that they have meaningful relations to other measures of the developing personality. Answers to these questions are important not only for vocational counselors but also for persons interested in all areas of psychological measurement and prediction. Measured interests, as psychometric variables, stand almost alone in the considerable amount of built-in validity that they possess. As reported earlier, criterion groups can be separated very sharply by interest measures. These differ-
349
ences are far greater than differences ordinarily obtained by using personality tests, intelligence tests, or tests of special aptitudes. The use, then, of interest measures in the broader areas of personality study surely is indicated and should add a great deal to understanding in that field. A most promising area for study is related to factors producing these observed differences among persons. Roe's work (1956) on the influence of developmental factors is important, as is the work of Holland (1962), Tyler (1964), and Super (1949; 1957). These investigators have provided conceptual frameworks that place interest measures in an orderly relation to life experience and to other facets of the developing personality. Thus, interest measures may some day permit a better review of earlier experiences and a better understanding of the effects of childhood and family experiences on satisfaction in work and on other aspects of adult life.
KENNETH E. CLARK [Directly related are the entries ACHIEVEMENT TESTING; APTITUDE TESTING; INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES; INTELLIGENCE AND INTELLIGENCE TESTING. Other relevant material may be found in COUNSELING PSYCHOLOGY; INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS; OCCUPATIONS AND CAREERS; PERSONALITY MEASUREMENT; PROFESSIONS.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
BERDIE, RALPH F. 1960 Strong Vocational Interest Blank Scores of High School Seniors and Their Later Occupational Entry. Journal of Applied Psychology 44: 161-165. CAMPBELL, DAVID P. 1966a Occupations Ten Years Later of High School Seniors With High Scores on the SVIB Life Insurance Salesman Scale. Journal of Applied Psychology 50:369-372. CAMPBELL, DAVID P. 1966b Stability of Interests Within an Occupation Over Thirty Years. Journal of Applied Psychology 50:51-56. CLARK, KENNETH E. 1961 The Vocational Interests of Nonprofessional Men. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press. CLARK, KENNETH E.; and CAMPBELL, D. P. 1965 Manual for the Minnesota Vocational Interest Inventory. New York: Psychological Corporation. DARLEY, JOHN G.; and HAGENAH, THEDA (1941) 1955 Vocational Interest Measurement. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press. -> First published as Clinical Aspects and Interpretation of the Strong Vocational Interest Blank. FRYER, DOUGLAS 1931 The Measurement of Interests in Relation to Human Adjustment. New York: Holt. HOLLAND, J. L. 1962 Some Explorations of Theory of Vocational Choice: I. One and Two Year Longitudinal Studies. Psychological Monographs 76, no. 26, serial no. 545. INSTITUTE ON THE STRONG VOCATIONAL INTEREST BLANK, UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA, 1955 1960 The Strong Vocational Interest Blank: Research and Uses. Edited
350
VOCATIONAL REHABILITATION
by Wilbur L. Layton. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press. KUDER, G. F. 1959 Manual for the Kuder Preference Record Occupation Form D. Chicago: Science Research Associates. ROE, ANNE 1956 The Psychology of Occupations. New York: Wiley. STRONG, EDWARD K. JR. 1943 Vocational Interests of Men and Women. Stanford Univ. Press. STRONG, EDWARD K. JR. 1955 Vocational Interests 18 Years After College. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press. SUPER, DONALD E. 1949 Appraising Vocational Fitness by Means of Psychological Tests. New York: Harper. SUPER, DONALD E. 1957 The Psychology of Careers. New York: Harper. TYLER, L. E. 1964 The Antecedents of Two Varieties of Vocational Interests. Genetic Psychology Monographs 70, no. 2:177-227.
VOCATIONAL REHABILITATION Throughout medical history one can find references to helping individuals to recover from the effects of illness or accidents. Only in the present century, however, have organized national efforts been effectively brought to bear on the problems of integrating physically, mentally, and emotionally disabled persons into the social and economic communities. Societies have only recently assumed responsibility for the assurance of equal opportunities for the large population of disabled persons. At one point in history, the impaired person was viewed socially as an object to be feared and avoided. His disability was seen in contexts of religious beliefs and superstition. If he could not be purged, charmed, or effectively prayed for, he was ostracized or set apart in some manner. His society accepted no real responsibility for him. In the nineteenth century society began to pay attention to "cripples" and to consider the mentally aberrant individual as one who suffered from an illness. At this time the pendulum also swung from ostracism to a regard for impaired persons as objects of pity who required custodial treatment (protection and care). Medical disciplines became more and more actively engaged in treatment. As this focus on treatment continued into the beginnings of the present century, however, disability came to be viewed against a background of the concept of the anatomically perfect man. Competence for work and for participation in social activities was determined by whether or not the individual was anatomically whole. Furthermore, attempts at treatment did not go beyond the anatomical defect to include the whole person but were focused on the affected parts and limited to the acute phases of illness.
Modern medicine's functional concept of disability rejects the focus on anatomical perfection in determining suitability and feasibility for employment and social participation. Instead, treatment and retraining restore as much capacity as possible, continuing posthospital rehabilitation services are utilized, and the individual is encouraged to utilize all of his remaining assets fully. In short, modern societies have assumed responsibility for helping impaired persons to work out their problems and to assume positions as adjusted participants in social activity. While formal national rehabilitation programs began after World War i, it was the climate provided by World War n, with its problems in rehabilitating returning servicemen, that gave the significant impetus to establishing total large-scale service programs for disabled persons. The emphasis on vocational rehabilitation was increased. In the United States, the federal-state program of rehabilitation, with its many interrelationships with the large network of private and community rehabilitation agencies, was greatly expanded by legislation developed on the premises that individuals require work in order to be truly independent and that, in being successful at work, they will repay to society the costs of their rehabilitation. Vocational rehabilitation became a good investment. At the same time, the intensified vocational emphasis, the focus on broader services, the continuance of services beyond the acute treatment phase, and the focus on working with the whole person instead of merely with his disability, brought new professional workers into rehabilitation. The advent of these new workers, particularly from the social and behavioral sciences, resulted in the development of new and broader concepts of rehabilitation. Definitions. Any discussion of vocational rehabilitation must be developed in the context provided by definitions of the more inclusive, unmodified term "rehabilitation." While the legislative and developmental history of the rehabilitation movement points to vocational success as the desired goal, many workers in rehabilitation prefer a broader concept. In large part this results from the fact that current social demands require rehabilitation work not only with the physically disabled but also with such groups as the emotionally disturbed, the disadvantaged youth, the older worker, the victim of poverty, the unemployed, and the mentally retarded. The breadth of the field of rehabilitation and the preferences of its professional subgroups make the search for an inclusive and meaningful definition of rehabilitation a frustrating task. It is difficult to accept any one definition. A brief review
VOCATIONAL REHABILITATION of the typical definitions, however, will point up common goals and suggest the accepted procedures employed in the process of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation is most often defined as a process seeking to achieve "restoration of the handicapped to the fullest physical, mental, social, vocational, and economic usefulness of which they are capable" (National Council on Rehabilitation 1944, p. 6). It has also been described as a creative process aiming to define, develop, and utilize the assets of the handicapped individual (Hamilton 1950). Rehabilitation may be seen as a concentration of individual and community resources to restore competitive ability, independence, economic selfsufficiency, and adjustment to work and social life. The term "handicapped" refers to the effects of losses or the interposition of physical, mental, or emotional barriers. The individual is handicapped with reference to the achievement of personal, social, or work adjustment. While the emphasis in most definitions of rehabilitation is on restoration of the handicapped to some productive and satisfying status, habilitation, or the achievement of productive and independent living for the first time, is also an important goal of rehabilitation. Some definitions stress achievement by the handicapped individual of the life most useful and satisfying for him. Rehabilitation has been defined as making a handicapped person aware of his potential and then providing the means of attaining that potential. Future developments in legislation and practice are likely to place increasing emphasis on improved independent living for any handicapped individual, even when direct contribution to the labor force or the national economy cannot be expected. When one examines how professionals perceive their field, it becomes obvious that there are considerable individual differences in the importance they attach to different underlying principles, on such matters as individual dignity, the right to compete, the addition of workers to the labor force, the conservation of manpower, increases in tax yield, decreases in relief expenditures, and the feeling that it is good to help others; some focus on helping people, others on justifying the large expenditure of funds required. Professional affiliations further complicate the establishment of a philosophy of rehabilitation that is acceptable to all workers in the field. This is understandable when one considers the different primary focus of each of the professions involved: to understand behavior, to study groups and the community, to understand family dynamics, and to heal men. It is accepted that rehabilitation is an interdis-
357
ciplinary enterprise; the theory and practice of psychology, medicine, and social work contribute in large measure to its efforts. It is felt to be maximally effective when medical, psychological, social work, educational, and employment skills are integrated in a team effort to work with the desires, needs, and unique total handicap of the impaired person. Whatever definition or philosophy of rehabilitation is favored by a particular person or group, perhaps all would agree that rehabilitation is concerned with practical problems in the lives of individuals; that it deals with past, present, and future individual behavior and with assisting the individual to find an optimal balance which will permit him to live as well as possible within the handicaps imposed by a disabling condition and in a manner consistent with his ability, aptitude, interests, and personality factors; that it involves active interprofessional participation in planning for and with individuals; and that, whenever feasible, it points toward some measure of vocational adjustment as an ultimate goal. Most workers would also agree that the rehabilitation effort would be facilitated by more attention to the development of ways of changing the attitudes of the public and employers (and perhaps of professional workers and their clients) toward the handicapped as a group and toward specific disability classes. Many of the problems of vocational rehabilitation are particularly relevant for psychology and should be amenable to the research approaches of psychologists. It is clear that psychology, as the science of behavior, and its applied specialties of counseling and clinical psychology play a large role in rehabilitation. It is also clear that rehabilitation is a large and viable effort and that it faces increasing social demands. Incidence of disability. The determination of the numbers of individuals who are disabled and who could profit from rehabilitation services poses many difficult problems. There are many national and international estimates of the disabled population. Some surveys simply rely on respondents' reports of disability; others focus on illness within a specified time period and include temporary conditions that do not result in residual disabilities. There is also reluctance, varying with the nature of the disabling condition, to disclose the presence of a disability in the respondent or in a member of the respondent's family. It is not feasible to give complete medical examinations to large numbers of individuals and to extrapolate to the population from these findings. Even if this were feasible, such findings would deal with medically defined
352
VOCATIONAL REHABILITATION
disability, which might be something quite different from disability in carrying out the various tasks of the many possible jobs theoretically available to each individual. In any event, it is difficult to determine the potential number of individuals who require, or could profit from, rehabilitation. The variety of estimates available can be illustrated by surveys conducted in the United States. In the period 1928 to 1931, the U.S. Public Health Service indicated that on the basis of its surveys Sin 1,000 were handicapped (U.S. Office . . . 1955). It has since been held that this estimate was much too low. In a national health survey in 1935-1936, the U.S. Public Health Service estimated on the basis of a house-to-house sampling that 11.7 in each 1,000 persons were unable to work, go to school, keep house, or carry on usual activities for one year preceding the survey (U.S. National Institute . . . 1938). In 1949-1950, governmental agency surveys estimated that there were 2,561,000 (outside of institutions) who were disabled, out of a total population of some 150 million individuals (Woolsey 1952). In a carefully controlled sampling study, carried out in 1958 by the Industrial Relations Center of the University of Minnesota, 10 per cent of persons in a state-wide sample indicated that they could not work or participate normally because of a disability (Minnesota, University of . . . 1958). In 1954, the Office of Vocational Rehabilitation, U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, estimated that there were two million people in the United States who had a disability and who required rehabilitation services to make them employable (U.S. Office . . . 1954). It was also estimated that 250,000 persons could be added to this number each year. In 1957-1958, the U.S. National Health Survey estimated that there were 24 million individuals outside of institutions, or one in seven persons, with varying degrees of permanent residual effects of disease or injury (U.S. National Health Survey 1959). It is obvious that accurate and reliable figures are difficult to find. It is, however, believed likely by persons active in the rehabilitation movement that there are now approximately 3 million disabled in the United States who could benefit from rehabilitation procedures and who could move off disability, welfare, and jobless rolls into productive areas (DiMichael 1964). Organization and financing. Vocational rehabilitation activities are strongly supported by the U.S. Vocational Rehabilitation Administration (VRA), the Veterans Administration, and the Public Health Service. Support is given in the areas of direct
service, training, and research. The largest program is the federal-state rehabilitation program administered by the VRA. This program embraces general agencies in the 50 states, the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. It also includes separate agencies for the blind in 36 states. These 90 agencies have 750 local offices serving handicapped clients. Some recent articles (U.S. Office . . . I960; Vocational Rehabilitation Administration 1964a; 1964Z?; 1964c) describing the first 44 years of the federal-state rehabilitation program include information which indicates that the rehabilitation effort is a substantial and increasing one. The growing need for application of research knowledge, for use of demonstrated research techniques, and for the devising of new research approaches to meet the growing demands for service and training in rehabilitation is also emphasized. The record of the federal-state program shows that 523 persons were rehabilitated to gainful employment and satisfying life in the first year of operation (fiscal year 1921). By 1961, the number had risen to 92,501 (see "Special Feature Section" 1960). In 1963 over 110,000 disabled men and women were returned to activity and jobs. In the present federal-state rehabilitation program, the federal government's share of the cost averages 62 per cent, the states' share 38 per cent. In 1921 the federal share was only $93,000, compared to $191,000 for the states. For the fiscal year 1964, federal expenditures totaled $85.7 million, state funds, $53.5 million. By 1962 federal VRA expenditures for research and demonstration totaled approximately $10 million. Research and demonstration grants had supported some 540 special projects which hold promise of contribution to the solution of rehabilitation problems. The VRA has also supported expansion programs, community projects, state extension and improvement projects, and state agency training grants. Training. For a decade the VRA has operated a program of training grants to colleges and universities interested in establishing or expanding programs to train professional workers in the fields contributing to rehabilitation. Training programs at the professional level are carried out in the fields of vocational rehabilitation counseling, physical medicine, speech pathology and audiology, prosthetic-orthotic education, occupational therapy, physical therapy, and social work. The VRA program in vocational rehabilitation counselor training started in 1955, at which time four universities were producing 12 graduates a
VOCATIONAL REHABILITATION 353 year. In 1964 the VRA (Vocational Rehabilitation Administration 1964&) was supporting such training at 37 universities and reported that 1,750 individuals had completed the graduate curriculum in vocational rehabilitation counseling. About 60 per cent of these graduates are employed in agencies serving disabled people. In 1967 there were VRA rehabilitation counselor training programs at 63 educational institutions. All of this activity is directed toward work in rehabilitation settings with disabled clients. Rehabilitation clients may be seen in a number of settings: state rehabilitation agency district offices, state agencies for the blind, rehabilitation centers, workshops for the mentally retarded, state or federal hospitals, institutes for the crippled and disabled, institutes of physical medicine and rehabilitation, and private agencies. Major rehabilitation centers are concentrated in urban areas and many are affiliated with large universities. Increasing attention is being given to expanding and coordinating rural facilities for serving the handicapped. Clients and personnel. Rehabilitation clients represent the whole range of physical, mental, and emotional disabilities, and the entire age range. Effort has been concentrated, however, on persons in the labor-force age range. The trend is toward increasing attention to the needs of the older worker and to working with persons over 65. The median age of rehabilitants at acceptance went from 26 in 1945 to 36 in 1958. In any rehabilitation effort a team of professionals will be found active, whether the team is a formal one in a particular institution or is informally made up of the practitioners of the contributing professions in a community. The professional workers active in the total effort with handicapped persons ordinarily include physicians and/or medical specialists, psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, counseling psychologists or vocational rehabilitation counselors, social workers and/or psychiatric social workers, audiologists, speech therapists, physical therapists, and occupational therapists. Also involved in the rehabilitation program are nurses, placement specialists, employment service representatives, prosthetic appliance specialists, etc. The main planning, service, and research, however, are carried out by professionals from the broad areas of medicine and surgery, the physical medicine specialties, psychology, and social work. Research. There is much evidence to indicate that rehabilitation workers and rehabilitation psychologists feel the need for research in problem areas relevant to psychology. The report of the
1958 Princeton conference on psychology and rehabilitation (Institute . . . 1959) lists over 300 research proposals gathered from rehabilitation psychologists in a preinstitute survey. Most of these proposals are concerned largely with psychodynamic and psychosocial problems, problems in spe~ cial disabilities, psychotherapeutic techniques, and psychological evaluation, tests, and techniques. There is also interest in research on problems of motivation and resistance, professional qualifications, competencies, and training, rehabilitation teams and team relationships, rehabilitation and the family, attitudes toward the handicapped, and vocational training and replacement. In a regional meeting of 15 state rehabilitation directors with psychologists from a state university, the following problem areas were among those mentioned in small group discussions: counseling techniques; criteria—what rehabilitation counsel' ing tries to accomplish; staff evaluation; counselor turnover; client follow-up; client satisfaction; case management standards; definitions of handicaps; employer satisfaction with handicapped employees; handicap stereotypes; and social stereotypes. These examples indicate simply that the need for research is felt by both rehabilitation personnel and psychologists working in rehabilitation settings. The research interests of psychologists in rehabilitation problems are illustrated in the report of the Miami conference on psychological research and rehabilitation (Conference . . . 1962). Since the late 1950s the VRA has been establishing regional research institutes to facilitate progress in finding new methods to aid the agencies seeking to rehabilitate vocationally a growing number of clients. Each of these institutes serves a block of state agencies. The first established institutes (Vocational Rehabilitation Administration 1964a; 1964Z?; 1964c), located at universities, are centering their activities around the following core areas: at Minnesota, methods of improving the work adjustment of disabled persons; at Wisconsin, the professional role of the rehabilitation counselor; at Florida, motivational and personality factors in rehabilitation; at Utah, interpersonal relations in rural rehabilitation; at Northeastern, motivation and dependency. A total of nine regional research institutes is planned. Further information on these institutes is available from the recent literature and from publications of the institutes (see, for example, Dawis et al. 1964; Vocational Rehabilitation Administration 1964a; 1964Z?; 1964c). All of the activity in definition, research, training, and service is aimed primarily at improving
354
VOCATIONAL REHABILITATION
the lot of clients of the federal-state-supported programs. The goal and the major program objectives of a typical state vocational rehabilitation agency might be formulated as follows: The goal is to rehabilitate vocationally all physically, mentally, and emotionally handicapped residents at the least possible cost, consistent with the highest standards of quality. In consideration of this goal, the following are the major agency program objectives: (1) To make available the full range of rehabilitation services, as needed, for all disabled who meet agency eligibility criteria. (2) To utilize and coordinate community resources, whenever needed, to enhance rehabilitation planning. (3) To employ a qualified professional staff that is able to rehabilitate a maximum number of disabled individuals at the highest standards of quality. (4) To encourage community and legislative understanding of vocational rehabilitation in order to secure necessary support and allow for maximum program development. (5) To explore and develop new methods of rehabilitation programming that will effectively enhance patterns of rehabilitation services for the disabled. LLOYD H. LOFQUIST [See also MENTAL DISORDERS, TREATMENT OF. Other relevant material may be found in BLINDNESS; CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY; COUNSELING PSYCHOLOGY; MEDICAL PERSONNEL, article on PARAMEDICAL PERSONNEL; MENTAL RETARDATION, SOCIAL WORK; WORKMEN'S COMPENSATION.] BIBLIOGRAPHY There is an abundance of literature on vocational rehabilitation practices and techniques. Representative texts are Allan 1958; Hamilton 1950; Lofquist 1957; Patterson 1958; 1960; Garrett & Levine 1962; and Wright 1960. Activity in conceptualizing the problems of rehabilitation and in research to provide a basis for service is wide ranging and is reported in a number of professional journals. Examples that by no means cover the whole range are Miller 1965, on the psychological impact of coronary artery disease; Gellman & Friedman 1965, on the workshop as a clinical rehabilitation tool; Ritchey 1965, on predicting the success of schizophrenics in industrial therapy; Strong & Insel 1965, on perception of the rehabilitation-counselor role by supervisors; Hartlage 1965, on rehabilitation counseling with psychiatric clients; Abels & Cantoni 1965, on the employ ability of blind dictaphone operators; Bradley & Stein 1965, on counselor experience and the prediction of rehabilitation client behavior; and Stone 1965, on the measurement of needs of physically disabled college students. Obermann 1965 describes the history of rehabilitation in America, emphasizing early history and the role of the National Rehabilitation Association in the development and support of rehabilitation legislation. ABELS, H. LEOLA; and CANTONI, Louis J. 1965 Employability of Blind Dictaphone Operators. New Outlook for the Blind 59:33-34.
ALLAN, W. SCOTT 1958 Rehabilitation: A Community Challenge. New York: Wiley. BRADLEY, ARTHUR D.; and STEIN, CARROLL 1965 Counselor Experience and Accuracy of Prediction of Client Behavior: Rehabilitation. Personnel and Guidance Journal 43:1015-1017. CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF REHABILITATION, MIAMI, 1960 1962 Psychological Research and Rehabilitation: Conference Report. Edited by Lloyd H. Lofquist. Washington: American Psychological Association. DAWIS, RENE V.; ENGLAND, GEORGE W.; and LOFQUIST, LLOYD H. 1964 Research Frontier: Regional Rehabilitation Research Institutes. Journal of Counseling Psychology 11:185-189. DIMICHAEL, SALVATORE G. 1964 Vocational Rehabilitation: A Major Social Force. Pages 534-555 in Henry Borow (editor), Man in a World at Work. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. GARRETT, JAMES F.; and LEVINE, EDNA S. (editors) 1962 Psychological Practices With the Physically Disabled. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. GELLMAN, WILLIAM; and FRIEDMAN, SIMON B. 1965 The Workshop as a Clinical Rehabilitation Tool. Rehabilitation Literature 26:34-38. HAMILTON, KENNETH W. 1950 Counseling the Handicapped in the Rehabilitation Process. New York: Ronald Press. HARTLAGE, LAWRENCE C. 1965 Rehabilitation Counseling With Psychiatric Clients. Rehabilitation Counseling Bulletin 9:14-18. INSTITUTE ON THE ROLES OF PSYCHOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGISTS IN REHABILITATION, PRINCETON, N.J., 1958 1959 Psychology and Rehabilitation. Edited by Beatrice A. Wright. Washington: American Psychological Association. -» See especially Appendix IV. LOFQUIST, LLOYD H. 1957 Vocational Counseling With the Physically Handicapped. New York: Appleton. MILLER, CLARENCE K. 1965 Psychological Correlates of Coronary Artery Disease. Psychosomatic Medicine 27: 257-265. MINNESOTA, UNIVERSITY OF, INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS CENTER 1958 A Survey of the Physically Handicapped in Minnesota. Minnesota Studies in Vocational Rehabilitation, No. 6. George W. England and Lloyd H. Lofquist, principal investigators. Univ. of Minnesota Press. NATIONAL COUNCIL ON REHABILITATION 1944 Symposium on the Processes of Rehabilitation. New York: The Council. OBERMANN, C. Esco 1965 A History of Vocational Rehabilitation in America. Minneapolis: Denison. PATTERSON, CECIL H. 1958 Counseling the Emotionally Disturbed. New York: Harper. PATTERSON, CECIL H. (editor) 1960 Readings in Rehabilitation Counseling. Champaign, 111.: Stipes. RITCHEY, RONALD E. 1965 Predicting Success of Schizophrenics in Industrial Therapy. Journal of Counseling Psychology 12:68-72. Special Feature Section. 1960 Rehabilitation Record 1, no. 3:3-24. -> Contains six articles. STONE, J. BLAIR 1965 The Edwards Personal Preference Schedule and Physically Disabled College Students. Rehabilitation Counseling Bulletin 9:11-13. STRONG, DONALD J.; and INSEL, SHEPARD A. 1965 Perceptions of the Counselor Role Among a Variety of Rehabilitation Counseling Supervisors. Journal of Counseling Psychology 12:141-147.
VOLTAIRE U.S. NATIONAL HEALTH SURVEY 1959 Impairments by Type, Sex and Age, United States, July 1957-June 1958. Washington: U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Public Health Services, Division of Public Health Methods. U.S. NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF HEALTH 1938 The National Health Survey: 1935-1936. Washington: U.S. Public Health Service, National Institute of Health, Division of Public Health Methods. U.S. OFFICE OF VOCATIONAL REHABILITATION 1955 Study of Programs for Homebound Handicapped Individuals. 84th Congress, 1st Session, House Document No. 98. Washington: Government Printing Office. U.S. OFFICE OF VOCATIONAL REHABILITATION 1960 A Tide in the Affairs of Men. Rehabilitation Record 1, no. 3:3-12. U.S. OFFICE OF VOCATIONAL REHABILITATION, DIVISION OF RESEARCH STATISTICS 1954 Number of Disabled Persons in Need of Vocational Rehabilitation. Rehabilitation Service Series No. 274. Washington: Government Printing Office. VOCATIONAL REHABILITATION ADMINISTRATION 1964a Seeking Answers Through Research. Rehabilitation Record 5, no. 4:11-13. VOCATIONAL REHABILITATION ADMINISTRATION 1964b VRA Support of Professional Training. Rehabilitation Record 5, no. 4:28-32. VOCATIONAL REHABILITATION ADMINISTRATION 1964c What State Programs Are Doing. Rehabilitation Record 5, no. 4:3-7. WOOLSEY, THEODORE D. 1952 Estimates of Disabling Illness Prevalence in the United States. Public Health Monograph No. 4. Washington: U.S. Public Health Service. WRIGHT, BEATRICE A. 1960 Physical Disability: A Psychological Approach. New York: Harper.
VOLTAIRE Francois Marie Arouet (1694-1778), known since his youthful literary beginnings solely by his pen name, Voltaire., was the most conspicuous figure of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and remains a culture hero for the spiritual heirs of that movement all over the world. His writings cover an enormous range, from light verse, epic and dramatic poetry, and prose fiction to history and many-sided pamphleteering. His correspondence alone, recently edited in 107 volumes by Theodore Besterman, provides material for a synopsis of the ideas, attitudes, and tactics of the philosophes of the Enlightenment (see Correspondence). Voltaire was briefly imprisoned in the Bastille on two occasions—in 1717 and in 1726—and his whole life was a series of verbal battles with what nowadays would be called the Establishment and, most vehemently, with the Roman Catholic church. But he was not quite the always-endangered rebel he has sometimes been made out to be, for the French government of the eighteenth century was an inefficient and self-distrustful one, its leaders
355
themselves often inspired by the ideas of the Enlightenment. Voltaire had friends in high places quite as powerful as his enemies. He came from a Parisian legal family and never knew economic want, or indeed serious economic difficulties, for his business talents were as great as his literary ones. In 1778, the year of his death, he made a triumphal progress from his estate at Ferney, near Geneva, to Paris, where he was given the kind of reception we associate with modern mass societies. This "apotheosis" is seen by many historians, not implausibly, as one of the major signs of the coming French Revolution. Voltaire's direct influence on the social sciences is greatest in the field of historical writing. He did indeed toss off a number of witty and often quoted remarks that were hardly befitting a serious historian. But when he said that "history is but a chronicle of crimes and misfortunes" he was casually expressing the view of a moralist outraged by naive optimism, and when he called history a fable convenue (aremark adapted from Fontenelle) he was referring specifically to histoires anciennes and implying that modern historians can do better. Both remarks are reflections of the fact that his "hundred volumes" (the duodecimo form of the eighteenth-century Kehl edition of Voltaire's works is in 92 volumes) were not the work of a systematic social scientist but of a brilliant, excitable, and inconsistent reformer and a close observer of human behavior. Voltaire's major historical works—Le siecle de Louis XIV (see 1751) and Essai sur les mceurs (1756)—-are still read, not only for their literary virtues but also for their contributions to cultural history. Voltaire had strong, unconcealed, and unsupported convictions of the kind historians are now not supposed to have—or if they do have them, must attempt to conceal or suppress. He hated organized Christianity for its basic belief in the supernatural and for what he held to be its support of social injustice. He therefore endorsed and intensified the eighteenth-century view that the Middle Ages were a period of barbarous misery. He disliked the Jews, not because of racial prejudice but because they seemed to him responsible for Christianity. He had an implicit belief—"theory" is too strong a word—in historical cycles and thought there had been four peaks of high cultural achievement: Periclean Athens, Augustan Rome, Renaissance Italy, and the France—indeed the Europe—of Louis xiv. He had, however, no real explanation for cyclical change and certainly no theory of systematic progress. His great ages are marked by the classic virtues of good taste and good manners and, above all, by the rule of reason;
356
VOLTAIRE
but he had no explanation of why the great ages gave way to disorder, barbarity, and the rule of superstition and fanaticism. Yet judged even by today's professional standards, Voltaire's virtues as a historian far outweigh his weaknesses. His use of sources and his critical apparatus could not satisfy the first generation of "scientific" historians in the late nineteenth century, but their successors have been kinder to him. For he did apply to his sources the common-sense, skeptical rationalism that helped to make him the representative of the Enlightenment that he was; even more important, although he by no means neglected war, diplomacy, and politics, he also paid close attention to what we now call economic, social, intellectual, and cultural history—the record, insofar as he could reconstitute it, of the lives of ordinary men and women; and, finally, he had a real sense for comparative history, although in some cases—for example, when he dealt with Far Eastern subjects—a somewhat uncritical one. Voltaire must also figure in the history of economic thought, if only because his poem Le mondain (written in 1736; see Morize 1908) and his prose expansions of its thesis were, after Mandeville's Fable of the Bees (1714), the most widely read of the whole series of eighteenth-century apologies for "luxury." Its paradox, le superftu, chose tres necessaire, is Voltairean indeed. Moreover, many of his tales and his pamphlets touch on such matters as free trade, currency, and the like, always a bit unprofessionally and journalistically but with a firm, pragmatic common sense and a determination to reject "evidence" based on the transcendental, the ineffable, and the marvelous, above all when such evidence was supported by convention. In sum, Voltaire's work is a major part of the great eighteenth-century matrix—part propaganda, part moralizing, part science, and, save for economics and jurisprudence, still relatively undifferentiated—out of which have emerged our present specialized social sciences. Voltaire's own central attitude is nicely summarized in what today is certainly his most widely read work, Candide (1759)—II faut cultiver notre jardin, or, man must and can make himself and his society. The whole of Voltaire's writings, save for some light verse and prose badinage, was devoted to the cause of the Enlightenment. This is true even of his tragedies, which are full of lines like: Nos pretres ne sont pas ce qu'un vain peuple pense; Notre credulite fait toute leur science. (Oedipe, Act iv, scene i) He was a tireless defender of civil liberties, especially in cases involving religious prejudices; in the
Galas case, the De la Barre case, and many others he brought all his talents to bear in defense of victims of the church, which he called I'infdme. Voltaire's methods as a propagandist make a still useful case study of the spread of the Enlightenment. He poured out anonymous or pseudonymous pamphlets, essays, and tales, often with a false place of publication, such as Amsterdam. (Generations of scholars have labored on these, so that today it is fairly well known just what he did and what he did not write.) His vast correspondence, some of which is written in adequate, often picturesque English, contributed almost as much as his other writings to the diffusion of the Enlightenment. Networks of correspondents played a role in the early development of the social sciences comparable to their role in the somewhat earlier development of the natural sciences. In the end, the acclaim accorded him along the road from Ferney (now officially Ferney-Voltaire) to Paris in 1778 shows that his reputation, his legend, and, no doubt in a vulgarized version, his ideas, had penetrated, at least in France, far beyond the intelligentsia or even the bourgeoisie, deep into the hearts and minds of the many. The legend of Voltaire (or rather legends, for he is villain in some, hero in others) is not the least important aspect of his existence for the social scientist. The range of judgments about him, well displayed in Peter Gay's Prologue to his Voltaire's Politics (1959, pp. 3-32) is remarkable. To the Christian apologist, like Joseph de Maistre, or to the conventional romanticist, like Wordsworth, who dared to call Candide "that dull product of a scoffer's pen," Voltaire is, of course, anathema. To the freethinker, the anticlerical of any sect, he is just as naturally a hero and a leader. But several generations of scholars and critics, professionally trained in objectivity, have made quite as varied and contradictory judgments of what Voltaire really meant. It is true that the taxonomist of ideas has an especially difficult task with the brilliant, witty, and verbally facile rebel, such as Voltaire—or Nietzsche, or Bernard Shaw—whose rebellion is to an important degree directed against all systems become conventions. The "real" Voltaire can hardly be given a Linnaean label. For the historian of ideas, the most interesting aspect of Voltaire's thought is the place he attributed to reason in human nature. Had Voltaire read German (which in his day few Frenchmen did), he would probably have concluded that the distinction in that language between Vernunft and Verstand is nonsense. What Voltaire meant by la raison, a word he constantly used, was what it meant to ordinary, reasonably bright Frenchmen: practical,
VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS: Anthropological Aspects empirical thinking of the kind done by the bookkeeper and, duly refined, by the scientist. But he by no means held, as some lesser philosophes, such as Helvetius, seem to have done, that given the right education and the right social environment, all men can use the gift of reason perfectly; nor did he hold that even the full gift of reason can unlock for those who have it all the mysteries, or solve all the problems, with which the universe confronts men. He summed up his position nicely in a letter written to Le Cati in 1741: "That which our eyes and mathematics demonstrate to us, we must hold to be true. In all the rest we must say only: I do not know" (see Gay 1959, p. 26). Voltaire's political ideas were consonant with his appraisal of ordinary human capacities. He was not a defender of "enlightened despotism"; on the other hand, he was not a very good democrat, if such a democrat must really believe that the many can be trusted to make policy, to guide the state by referenda. In the balance, he leaned toward an almost Fabian hope or trust that an intelligent minority will act as guide—but never as tyrant— and would leave ordinary men reasonably free to behave reasonably well. Voltaire, then, was in a sense a skeptic, at least in not accepting conventional Christianity or indeed any formal theology or metaphysics; but he was also in a sense a believer, and from his work, along with that of many others, has been built up a world view, a faith that has no church but many followers. All these followers have in common a rejection of traditional sacramental Christianity and its immanent God; many of them are also optimistic, rationalistic, egalitarian, and democratic in a way that Voltaire, whom they almost always revere, was not. Yet one suspects that even today he would not altogether repudiate his children. Although in his style, and in much of his substance, Voltaire conforms to the stereotype of the French national character current among French and foreigners alike, he has never quite been accepted in France as that essential figure in modern nationalism, the one great writer who is both supremely national and supremely universal, France has no Shakespeare, no Dante, no Cervantes, no Goethe. For so many of his countrymen Voltaire's ecrasez I'infdme is still so partisan and so bitter a memory as to deprive him of such a place in the hearts of all his countrymen. CRANE BRINTON WORKS BY VOLTAIRE
(1733) 1961 Philosophical Letters. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill. -> First published as Letters Concerning the English Nation. The French edition was published in 1734.
357
(1751) 1962 The Age of Louis XIV. New York: Button. -> First published as Le siecle de Louis XIV. (1756) 1963 Essai sur les moeurs et I'esprit des nations et sur les principaux fails de I'histoire depuis Charlemagne jusqu'a Louis XIII. 2 vols. Paris: Gamier. (1759) 1966 Candide: Or, Optimism. Translated and edited by Robert M. Adams. New York: Norton. -> First published as Candide: Ou I'optimisme. Correspondence. Edited by Theodore Besterman. 107 vols. Geneva: Institut et Musee Voltaire, 1953-1965. H> Includes letters dated 1704-1778 in 98 volumes, and 9 volumes of appendixes, bibliographies, and indexes. Oeuvres completes de Voltaire. 92 vols. in duodecimo. Kehl (Germany): Imprimerie de la Societe Litteraire-typographique, 1785—1789. -> Edited by Beaumarchais, Condorcet, and Decroix. The Societe also published a 70-volume edition in octavo. Oeuvres completes de Voltaire. 52 vols. Edited by Louis Moland. Paris: Gamier, 1877-1885. -> Includes the 2-voIume Table generale et analytique, by Charles Pierrot. The Portable Voltaire. Edited with an introduction by Ben Ray Redman. New York: Viking, 1949. The Romances of Voltaire. New York: Dial, 1928. -» Contains Candide, Zadig, Princess of Babylon, The Child of Nature, Micromegas, Cosi-sancta, Memnon, and The One-eyed Porter. First published in French. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
BENGESCU, GEORGE 1882-1890 Voltaire: Bibliographic de ses ceuvres. 4 vols. Paris: Perrin. -» An index to the Bibliographie was published in 1953 by the Institut et Musee Voltaire in Geneva. BRUMFITT, J. H. 1958 Voltaire: Historian. Oxford Univ. Press. GAY, PETER 1959 Voltaire's Politics: The Poet as a Realist. Princeton Univ. Press. -» See especially the Prologue and the "Bibliographical Essay," pages 355-395. LANSON, GUSTAVE (1906) 1966 Voltaire. Translated by Robert A. Wagoner, with an introduction by Peter Gay. New York: Wiley. -» First published in French. MANDEVILLE, BERNARD (1714) 1957 The Fable of the Bees: Or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon. -> A paperback edition was published in 1962 by Putnam. MORIZE, ANDRE (1908) 1909 L'apologie du luxe au XVIIIe siecle, et Le mondain de Voltaire: Etude critique sur Le mondain et ses sources. Paris: Didier. Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century. -> Published by the Institut et Musee Voltaire in Geneva since 1955. The 44 volumes issued to date (1966) were edited by Theodore Besterman.
VOLUNTARY
ASSOCIATIONS
i. ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASPECTS ii. SOCIOLOGICAL ASPECTS
Michael Banton David L. Sills
ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASPECTS
An association is a group organized for the pursuit of one interest or of several interests in common. Associations are usually contrasted with involuntary groupings serving a greater variety of ends, such as kin groups, castes, social classes, and communities.
358
VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS: Anthropological Aspects
Attention was first drawn to the characteristics and significance of associations in the context of the evolutionary approach to social phenomena. Although the earlier writers took little interest in particular associational forms (a general study made by Heinrich Schurtz in 1902 was an exception), they attributed great importance to the shift from involuntary to voluntary kinds of grouping. Sir Henry Maine stressed the movement from relations based upon status as determined by birth to relations of contract deriving from the free agreement of individuals. Maine thought of early society not only as being based upon kinship but as lacking settled residence. He said that "when a tribal community settles down finally upon a definite space of land, the Land begins to be the basis of society in place of the Kinship" (Maine [1875] 1897, p. 72). According to this view (later reiterated by Morgan), territorial association is a new principle of human grouping that makes possible the emergence of the state. Ferdinand Tonnies made a similar distinction when he contrasted Gemeinschaft with Gesellschaft; Emile Durkheim and others continued in the same tradition. Insofar as the concept "association" differentiates certain forms of grouping from others (e.g., castes from clans) its theoretical value lies in the analysis of social evolution. Voluntary associations become more common and significant as societies advance in technology, complexity, and scale; hence, their study is part of the study of social change. A good illustration of the point at which associations first emerge is provided by the Blackfoot Indians of the North American plains. The Blackfoot's existence was formerly based on hunting the buffalo: as the feeding habits of the buffalo changed from season to season, so Indian life had to change correspondingly. In the autumn and winter when pasture was poor, the buffalo wandered about in small herds. The Blackfoot also traveled about in small bands of kinfolk led by a man chosen for skill in hunting and fairness in his dealings. In late spring the buffalo congregated in enormous herds, fattening on the fresh and abundant grass. The Blackfoot bands also combined, forming social and economic units that could most efficiently hunt the great herds. Most men were members of societies that included men of similar age. These societies organized the encampments, maintained order, and coordinated hunting operations during the summer migrations. The societies also performed dances and ceremonies. Quite apart from the explicit ends served by these associations, they brought men from different bands into rela-
tions of solidarity. Although a young man might choose which society he would join, it was hardly conceivable that he should belong to none. In this case the principle of association was compounded with that of age-grouping, and membership was voluntary only in a restricted sense. In the comparative analysis of social organization it seems preferable to keep the two principles of grouping separate. Lowie, who did not press this distinction, concluded that the distribution and form of associations were so irregular that they defied logical classification ([1948] 1960, p. 295). Nevertheless, a very loose pattern can be observed: among relatively small and technologically primitive groups, associations tend to be organized for recreation and the expression of distinctions of rank; in larger tribal societies they may exercise important governmental functions, and with an increasing division of labor they tend to be founded for the pursuit or defense of economic interests. Among the Crow Indians, there was a cult organized as an association to undertake the ceremonial planting of tobacco; this was believed to promote the welfare of the tribe. Membership in the Tobacco society conferred prestige and was acquired by paying a substantial fee to a sponsor. Members performed special songs and dances. The various chapters shared the fees of novices. Both men and women might belong, and it was common to initiate a man and his wife at the same time (Lowie 1935). Another example can be taken from the culture of the Banks Islands (Melanesia), in which there were two distinct sets of associations, one secular and one ceremonial. A young man at puberty was initiated into a young man's club (sukwe) if he or his kinsmen paid the required entrance fee. He could afterwards advance to higher ranks within the club by giving costly presents. Initiation could take place at any age, and recruits did not have to start in the lowest rank. The principal functions of these sukwe seem to have been those of fostering sociability and fixing rank. The other associations (tamate) were ritualistic and secret; masks were worn and the meeting places were taboo to women and uninitiated males. No one could pass above a certain rank within sukwe unless he had been initiated into the most important of the tamate societies, but neither society had any direct part in government. The Ariori society of the Society Islands (Polynesia) included both male and female members. It was numerically strong and divided into a series of ranks. The principal function of the Ariori was to provide public entertainment, but it seems in addition to have been a powerful integrative force
VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS: Anthropological Aspects in the community. The religious aspect of the ceremonials was also important; members were obliged to kill any new children they might bear, apparently to avoid obligations that might interfere with their Ariori responsibilities (Williamson 1939, pp. 113-153). Associations have been highly developed in west Africa, where they play an explicit part in the process of government (for example, see Brown 1951). Among the Yako in eastern Nigeria there is a pattern of dense settlement with authority concentrated at the level of the local group. Associations of varying kinds were based on both the ward, including about three thousand people, and the village, which could have a population of up to ten thousand. Neither within nor between them was there any explicit hierarchy of authority, although the plurality of associations was remarkable. The maintenance of order ultimately depended on the common understanding and coincident interests of the associations, but because they were based on different groupings and their membership overlapped, consensus was more easily obtained. In each ward .there was an association of "leaders," the head of which had moral authority over other men's associations: the "fighters," the "hunters," and a graded ritual association into which most males were initiated. Within each ward there was also an independent association that offered supernatural protection to its members and regarded itself as a means of defense against any abuse of power by the "leaders"; it had become a reluctantly tolerated opposition. The village was a larger unit than the ward and had a cult association with about fifty members, to which ward leaders usually belonged. The head of this village association belonged to a council of priests, which appeared to have begun as a combination of diverse cults associated with matrilineal clans but had become a corporation of considerable solidarity. This council had judicial and deliberative capacities supported by ritual powers and moral authority, but it could not enforce its views. Other village associations had police powers, such as "the body of men" concerned with trespass and the stealing of crops. A body with more prestige, consisting of forty men, was concerned chiefly with land disputes and trading relations. The members were pledged to divulge information on alleged offenses to the association and to keep them secret from outsiders. Admission to this association was by succession on the death of a close patrilineal kinsman. The radical decentralization of authority among the Yako is depend-
359
ent upon the extensive use of associational grouping in conjunction with double unilineal descent and influential spirit cults (Forde 1961, pp. 309-323). In west Africa, associations also play an important part in the government of some societies with centralized, statelike, authority, such as the Yoruba in western Nigeria and the Mende in Sierra Leone. In parts of Yorubaland, the Ogboni association of elders was a judicial body, which in Abeokuta elected and could remove the principal political chief. The Ogboni had at its disposal a society of hunters and scouts who would seize the property of an uncooperative minor offender and a ritual association that carried out executions of criminals. Among the Mende, the Poro society used to be the most powerful organ of government. The functions of the Mende chief were of a secular character, concerned with military and administrative duties; he could be deposed or reproved by the Poro, which controlled all important ritual activities and met in secret. All youths were initiated into the Poro and received training in masculine tasks and morals, but actual authority was limited to the senior members. Other Mende associations exercised authority over particular realms of activity: the Humui supervised sexual behavior, the Njayei treated insanity, and the Kpa dealt with minor physical disorders. The Sande was a women's society paralleling the Poro, and as the voice of organized feminine opinion it too could be of political importance (Little 1951). Among other peoples, such as the Ashanti in Ghana, the Dahomey, and the Nupe in northern Nigeria, the central government controlled the use of force and state rituals. For example, among the Ashanti young men's military organizations had a voice in the election of a chief, but in general no important spheres of authority in these societies were left to independent bodies such as associations. Where found, associations usually organized mutual aid and recreation. Savings clubs, widespread in this region, often had power to regulate the behavior of their members. The appearance of associations seems to be linked with new forms of economic activity. Among the Temne in Sierra Leone, for example, the introduction of swamp-rice cultivation created new labor demands for the initial clearing of the swamps and for the annual farming cycle. A secret society was formed for clearing the swamps, and young men's associations were founded to help with the farming. Traveling from farm to farm and working collectively, the young men were able to earn extra money and productivity was much higher (Ban ton 1957, pp. 20-21, 193-195).
360
VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS: Anthropological Aspects
Among the Yoruba, at one time the craft industries (blacksmithing, weaving, wood carving, etc.) were organized on the model of the lineage structure, but in recent times guilds have been created to train apprentices and to regulate the activity of such new craftsmen as the goldsmith, tinker, gunsmith, sawyer, carpenter, tailor, barber, builder, leatherworker, shoemaker, and bicycle repairer. These guilds are organized on a contractual basis independent of kinship (Lloyd 1953, pp. 30-44). In situations of rapid social change, voluntary associations are important as a means of organizing people in order to achieve new ends, such as the raising of capital, the regulation of prices, and the provision of extra labor. They are also of great significance to the social scientist in that they reveal cultural values and goals that the participants themselves are unable to formulate. One aspect that has impressed outside observers is the plethora of honorific titles and apparently gratuitous ceremonials. These are found, for example, in Haitian work societies (Metraux 1951, pp. 73-86) and Melanesian cargo cults (Worsley 1957, p. 241), as well as in various African associations (Banton 1957, pp. 181-182). Some writers have seen in such associations a clue to the motivations of the participants and an explanation of the popularity of associations. Discussing some modern urban associations in Nigeria, one anthropologist described "the realism with which this playing at society a la Europeenne is enacted" and stated that "psychologically, it has the significance of a substitute for thrills and achievements which normal life cannot offer" (Nadel 1942, p. 391). Analyzing entertainment societies in a Northern Rhodesian town, another writer held that in the 1920s the appeal of this play acting was the vicarious participation in European society, but that by the 1950s the participants' reference group had become the African national elite of professionals and white-collar employees (Mitchell 1956, pp. 12-15). By wearing smart European clothes in a particular style, the members of a dancing group identified themselves with Africans who had advanced further up the modern scale of social status. Another important aspect of rapid social change is the way new forms of organization create new roles and relationships. Innovation of this kind is usually a trial-and-error procedure in which the motivations of the participants are influenced by circumstances they only partly understand. For example, in eastern Nigeria during the middle and late 1940s, numerous associations were developed on the basis of lineage, clan, village, village-group,
division, and tribe. Their aim was to carry out various economic, educational, political, social, and general reforms directly related to changing cultural conditions. Ottenberg (1955) reported that by 1953 almost half the villages of the Afikpo Ibo had such associations. They subscribed loans to help members needing capital for developing trade or farming. They made bicycle paths, improved water supplies, and gave scholarships to promising students. These associations expressed the interests of the young men who, partly because of the war, had learned more about the outside world. These men could not work effectively for modern goals through the traditional institutions, so they formed and supported new associations. The success of voluntary associations in the rural villages often reflects increasing consciousness of the outer world. The villagers resent the scorn of outsiders about their backward condition and come together more closely to compete with other villages for new prizes. Voluntary associations in the cities have many features similar to those in villages, but they differ in that initially they serve only as substitutes for the traditional institutions with which the migrant has lost touch. The first kind of urban association to appear, therefore, is the bereavement benefit society, which takes over the kin group's responsibilities in the event of death. If a member who has no kinfolk within easy reach should die, the society arranges the funeral. If a member has to arrange the funeral of one of his relatives, the society contributes money and attends the ceremonies to support the colleague by honoring his dead. In Abidjan, Ivory Coast, there is some intermarriage between immigrants from the strongly patrilineal societies of the far interior savanna zone and women from matrilineal societies of the western coastal zone. Since both parents claim offspring for their own lineages, marital unions are frequently short-lived and often conclude with neither kin group assuming full responsibility for the child. These "lost children" join together in mutual aid societies that play the part of a kin group in helping members learn a trade and in presiding over marriages (Rouch 1963). It is in the sphere of economic activity that urban associations most evidently create relationships on a new pattern. Among male workers in industrial occupations, the employment situation has forced workers' associations to develop quite rapidly into trade unions. Initially, the workers formed multipurpose societies to meet the whole range of their needs. The first Sudanese trade union, for example, included in its aims mutual
VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS: Anthropological Aspects help in times of illness, death, and unemployment; the establishment of savings schemes and cooperative societies; and the organization of "literary and scientific lectures" (Hodgkin 1956, p. 127). The case of the copper mines of Northern Rhodesia is particularly instructive. In the early 1930s, the mine managers introduced a system of tribal representation in order to open channels of workermanagement consultation with African employees. It was soon found that in situations of industrial tension, tribal affiliation was rendered irrelevant by the dominant cleavage between employers and mine workers. The Africans' common occupational role was the critical one, and they had to organize on an industrial basis if they were to advance their interests. In the process, they learned new relationships and norms (Epstein 1958). Among nonindustrial male workers, such as fishermen, truck drivers, and other self-employed persons, occupational associations tend to remain on a multipurpose level. Women's occupational associations show similar features, although in southern Nigeria there are women's societies that run a bakery, a laundry, a calabash workshop, and a gari mill (Little 1965, p. 127). The formulation of new roles and relationships is also apparent in the features of voluntary associations that seem to have no useful purpose. As has been mentioned, many of these associations support a much greater variety of ranks and titles than is necessary to the functioning of the organization. The traditional norms for ascribing social status are in conflict with the new social patterns dictated by the world economy into which the societies are rapidly being propelled. Voluntary associations, therefore, develop ways of honoring the people they think worthy; the overelaborate system of ranks serves as a means of differentiating the relative merits of members and of giving an indigenous character to values obtained from the new influences. Because members are not always firmly committed to the new ways and treasurers are all too likely to abscond, the associations have to experiment with varying forms of organization. The proliferation of titled officers provides a justification for involving several members in money matters and other areas important to the society, while the enjoyment of a special title increases the individual member's loyalty. The representation of minor European ceremonials in the conduct of meetings, the use of European languages by some groups, and similar features may be seen as part of a process in which young men brought up in traditional societies based on ascribed status learn instead the principles of conduct important
367
in an achievement-oriented society. As one writer has commented: in using English at their meetings, the Africans were learning to handle one of the most important tools of the new culture. When Africans conversed together in English, they showed that they had interests in common which cut across tribal divisions. Furthermore, in the handling of novel concepts they were broadening their intellectual horizons, and making possible closer contact and acquaintance with the world outside. (Epstein 1958, p. 84) Further support for an interpretation stressing how African urban associations institutionalize new roles and buttress new standards of general conduct may be found in the way associations in a particular town can often be ranked in terms of prestige. At the bottom come the simplest associations, which arrange entertainment for holidays and appeal to the least sophisticated immigrants; the members could not make a success of a more elaborate organization. Above them come the permanent recreational groups and friendly societies supported by the more ambitious young people. Then come the social clubs of the elite, whose aims are more narrowly defined and whose organizational structure is less complicated. Thus, at the bottom of this scale people are not concerned with innovation; at the top, the new values have been fairly securely established and are supported by other institutions; it is in the middle that the process of adaptation is most in evidence. It should also be mentioned that in emphasizing particular standards—whether or not they are new— the members of such bodies reinforce processes of social control. In rapidly changing circumstances of social control, problems of delinquency, crime, and dereliction of customary obligations become pressing. Modernist associations reward those people who respond in the approved way and withhold approval from others; in addition to such sanctions, the associations sometimes take direct action against those they see as wrongdoers who are not punished by other institutions. Thus, as several writers have stressed, voluntary associations in African cities have both adaptive and integrative functions (e.g., Banton 1957; Little 1965). Association as a principle of social grouping is more general, however, than a consideration of friendly societies and clubs might imply. The evidence in Africa makes clear that a variety of new institutions have been obliged by the course of social change to organize on associational lines. The case of trade unions has been touched upon.
362
VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS: Sociological Aspects
Political parties are another instance. They have often developed out of the "welfare societies" and similar bodies organized by the more educated Africans. In the early phases the tendency was toward loose political alliances of the "Congress" type that represented the opposition to colonial rule. With the extension of the franchise, party organizations were needed to marshal supporters, have them registered as electors, explain voting symbols and procedures, spread propaganda, and ascertain public opinion (Hodgkin 1956, pp. 139168). The organizational basis of parties had to be associational. In most cases, however, majority parties, after independence, have insisted that they serve the widest range of interests and are rebuilding the very structure of society; this has limited the scope for any association that is, or can be represented as, an opposition party. A similar sequence can be detected in independent religious groups under colonial rule. In the earlier phases of contact, an all-embracing prophetic movement may express the resentments and aspirations of the people, but the independent church later becomes the characteristic institution. The church has a more limited field of action, and the loyalty of its members is maintained by a complex infrastructure of prayer guilds, social clubs, etc., which, like a friendly society, may support members in bereavement. Because their potential members have similar needs and are accustomed to similar social arrangements, trade unions, political parties, independent churches, and friendly societies are obliged to organize in similar ways. It is unusual for research to be designed to investigate the characteristics of associations in preliterate or developing societies, although frequently the significance of associational activity is revealed in the course of inquiries into other matters. This trend will probably continue. Associations are of interest to the social scientist only if examined from a particular standpoint, which usually entails study of a wider range of institutions. This discussion may have shown some of the merits and limitations of a bird's-eye evolutionary approach to the topic and may have indicated that it is more fruitful to study the significance of associations in particular phases of social change. The present need is for the formulation of theories that can be tested cross-culturally; this may result in the substitution of other concepts for the term "association" if they will permit the diversity of phenomena to be classified in a manner that relates them more directly to a theory of social organization. MICHAEL BANTON
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BANTON, MICHAEL 1957 West African City: A Study of Tribal Life in Freetown. Oxford Univ. Press. BANTON, MICHAEL 1965 Roles: An Introduction to the Study of Social Relations. London: Tavistock. BROWN, PAULA 1951 Patterns of Authority in West Africa. Africa 21:261-278. EPSTEIN, ARNOLD L. 1958 Politics in an Urban African Community. Manchester (England) Univ. Press; New York: Humanities Press. FORDE, C. DARYLL 1961 The Governmental Roles of Associations Among the Yako. Africa 31:309-323. HODGKIN, THOMAS L. 1956 Nationalism in Colonial Africa. London: Muller. LITTLE, KENNETH L. 1951 The Mende of Sierra Leone: A West African People in Transition. London: Routledge. LITTLE, KENNETH L. 1965 West African Urbanization: A Study of Voluntary Associations in Social Change. Cambridge Univ. Press. LLOYD, PETER 1953 Craft Organization in Yoruba Towns. Africa 23:30-44. LOWIE, ROBERT H. (1935)1956 The Crow Indians. New York: Rinehart. LOWIE, ROBERT H. (1948) 1960 Social Organization. New York: Holt. MAINE, HENRY S. (1875) 1897 Lectures on the Early History of Institutions. 7th ed. London: Murray. -» A sequel to the author's Ancient Law. METRAUX, ALFRED 1951 Making a Living in the Marbial Valley, Ha'iti. A report prepared by Alfred Metraux in collaboration with E. Berrouet and Dr. and Mrs. Jean Comhaire-Sylvain. Occasional Papers in Education, No. 10. Paris: UNESCO. MITCHELL, JAMES C. 1956 The Kalela Dance: Aspects of Social Relationships Among Urban Africans in Northern Rhodesia. Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, Papers, No. 27. Manchester (England) Univ. Press. NADEL, SIEGFRIED F. 1942 A Black Byzantium: The Kingdom of Nupe in Nigeria. Published for the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures. Oxford Univ. Press. OTTENBERG, S. 1955 Improvement Associations Among the Afikpo Ibo. Africa 25:1-28. ROUGH, JEAN 1963 Second Generation Migrants in Ghana and the Ivory Coast. Pages 300-304 in International African Seminar, First, Makerere College, 1959, Social Change in Modern Africa. Oxford Univ. Press. SCHURTZ, HEINRICH 1902 Altersklassen und Mdnnerbunde: Eine Darstellung der Grundformen der Gesellschaft. Berlin: Reimer. WILLIAMSON, ROBERT W. 1939 Essays in Polynesian Ethnology. Edited by Ralph Piddington. Cambridge Univ. Press. WORSLEY, PETER 1957 The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of "Cargo" Cults in Melanesia. London: MacGibbon & Kee. II SOCIOLOGICAL ASPECTS
Definitions of the term "voluntary association," as it applies to organizations in modern societies, differ widely, but they generally contain three key elements. A voluntary association is an organized group of persons (1) that is formed in order to
VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS: Sociological Aspects further some common interest of its members; (2) in which membership is voluntary in the sense that it is neither mandatory nor acquired through birth; and (3) that exists independently of the state. Even this broad definition admits some exceptions. Membership in such voluntary associations as labor unions or professional societies may be a condition of employment or professional practice, and thus may not be truly voluntary. Membership in a church or in a family society may be "inherited" from one's parents and, in that sense, not voluntary. Many voluntary associations are subject to state control to the extent that they must be registered, and agencies of the state often create or sponsor voluntary associations in order to achieve their own ends. (This occurs in both totalitarian and democratic societies: the 4-H Clubs of America, for example, are voluntary associations that direct vocational and other activities for more than two million farm youths, yet they are sponsored by the Extension Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.) In spite of the exceptions, however, these three characteristics provide a framework for a consideration of the distinctly sociological importance of voluntary associations. Denned in these broad terms, voluntary associations include all nonstate organizations—churches, business firms, labor unions, foundations, private schools and universities, cooperatives, and political parties. In most of the writings on voluntary associations (including the present article), a much narrower definition is used. The broad definition is of great interest historically, however, since it is central to the principle of the freedom of association upon which all voluntary associations depend for their existence. It is also relevant to studies of contemporary associations, since it forces the researcher to pay attention to what he is actually studying when he seeks to study the extent of membership in voluntary associations or the functions which voluntary associations serve for their members or for society. The history of the principle of freedom of association, defined by Laski as "a recognized legal right on the part of all persons to combine for the promotion of purposes in which they are interested" (1931, p. 447), is extremely complex. Briefly, although both guilds (or "gilds") of artisans and corporations existed in antiquity, their existence was defined by the state as a convenience or privilege, not as a right [see CORPORATION; GILDS]. This tolerance has led to the notion that corporations originated as creatures of the state —which is how they are regarded in American legal theory—and to the stipulation in some defi-
363
nitions of voluntary associations that they be unincorporated (Mishnun 1934, p. 283). But the distinction is quite meaningless as far as contemporary voluntary associations (at least in the United States) are concerned: whether a voluntary association is incorporated or not is largely a practical question decided by the officers and has few consequences for its activities or its function in society. There is a fine but clear distinction between the willingness of the state to tolerate the existence of voluntary associations and the right of individuals to create and join associations, provided only that they do not disturb law and order. This right was first won in Europe by guilds and Protestant religious groups; according to Laski (1931, p. 449), in its modern form the right had its origin in Locke's treatment of the churches in his Letter Concerning Toleration. The acceptance by the state of this right is obviously fundamental to the maintenance of civil liberties. It is also central to the most significant role that voluntary associations play in society: since they are created by individuals and are independent of the state, they can serve to mediate between the individual and society (as well as between the individual and such groupings as the professions). Accordingly, the study of voluntary associations can do much to illuminate what is probably the most general problem in all the social sciences: the relationship of the individual, with his needs, to society, with its requirements. Although all nonstate, common-purpose organizations with voluntary memberships are voluntary associations, that is, organizations whose existence is dependent upon freedom of association, the present article will focus upon organizations that meet both of two additional criteria. First, the major activity of the organization is not related to the business of making a living, that is, to the economic activities of its members (as in the case of professional associations, trade unions, or cooperatives). Second, the volunteer (i.e., nonsalaried) members constitute a majority of the participants (as they do not in corporations, universities, or foundations, in which the directors or trustees are in a minority vis-a-vis the employees, faculty, or students). "Spare-time, participatory associations" might be the best description of the associations most frequently referred to in this article. Voluntary associations that do not meet these criteria are described in detail elsewhere in the encyclopedia. "Making-a-living" associations include business firms [see BUSINESS MANAGEMENT; CORPORATION; INDUSTRY, SMALL], trade associations [see CARTELS AND TRADE ASSOCIATIONS], production, marketing, and consumer cooperatives [see
364
VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS: Sociological Aspects
COOPERATIVES], professional associations [see PROFESSIONS], and labor unions [see LABOR UNIONS]. "Minority membership" associations include philanthropic foundations [see FOUNDATIONS; PHILANTHROPY], private schools and universities [see EDUCATION; UNIVERSITIES], and lobbies [see INTEREST GROUPS; LOBBYING]. These organizations have many of the characteristics of spare-time participatory associations, but they are sufficiently different in their internal characteristics and in the functions they serve, both for their members and for society, to warrant separate discussion. Churches and political parties are voluntary associations that also are not discussed in detail in this article, on the grounds that the research literature upon which the article is based generally does not include them and that they are discussed in detail elsewhere in the encyclopedia [see PARTIES, POLITICAL; POLITICAL CLUBS; RELIGIOUS ORGANIZATION; SECTS AND CULTS]. The rationale for excluding them is rather weak, however, since they are sparetime participatory organizations that are independent of the state. Both Figgis (1913) and Lindsay (1943) based their distinctions between the state and society upon the assumption that both churches and political parties are voluntary associations. The plan of this article is as follows. First comes a brief review of the research evidence on the distribution of voluntary associations in modern societies and on the extent of participation in them. This is followed by a description of some of the classifications that sociologists have developed in order to construct typologies of voluntary associations. Then comes a discussion of the organizational processes that are most characteristic of voluntary associations. Finally, there is a summary of the major assertions that have been made about the functions which voluntary associations serve for individuals and for society, together with some discussion of the evidence that either exists or is needed to demonstrate that these functions are in fact performed. Extent and membership The data on the number of spare-time, participatory voluntary associations (hereafter called voluntary associations) in modern societies and on the proportion of the population that belongs to them are scattered, and comparisons between studies are made difficult by differences in definitions and in research objectives. What is badly needed—and wrhat has not as yet even been approximated—is a definition of a voluntary association that can be applied cross-culturally and that would permit a count of the number of voluntary
associations which exist in various societies and in a sample of communities within societies. Such a count should be reported both as a total and on a per capita basis. Membership in different kinds of voluntary associations should be determined by sample surveys, and the extent of membership participation should be ascertained by studies of the organizations themselves. Finally, measures should be obtained of the importance of this activity to the life of the society. In the absence of these ideal data, something can be learned from an examination of the handful of studies that do exist. These studies have found voluntary associations to be characteristic of urban societies and the most urbanized areas of all societies. Why is this so? Population density is certainly a major reason: the more people there are in a community, the more forms of interaction of all kinds exist. The higher socioeconomic status of urban residents is another explanation: urban residents belong to voluntary associations not only because they are urbanites but also because they tend to be educated, socially active people. In a classic essay, Louis Wirth cited the weakness of kinship, family, and neighborhood ties in the city as an explanation: "Being reduced to a stage of virtual impotence as an individual, the urbanite is bound to exert himself by joining with others of similar interests into organized groups to obtain his ends" (1938, p. 22). Even sharper differences than rural-urban ones are found between different rural societies. Rural Japanese communities, for example, have many voluntary associations (Norbeck 1962), while towns in southern Italy have none or very few (Banfield 1958). A possible explanation, based on studies of rural Denmark (Anderson & Anderson 1958) and west Africa (Little 1965), is that voluntary associations are both numerous and influential in rural communities undergoing rapid urbanization. Since Tocqueville made his famous observation in Democracy in America—"In no country of the world has the principle of association been more successfully used or applied to a greater multitude of objects than in America" ([1835] 1945, vol. 1, p. 198)—and Bryce made his in The American Commonwealth—"[They are] created, extended, and worked in the United States more quickly and effectively than in any other country" ([1888] 1933, vol. 2, pp. 281-282)—the United States has often been described by observers as "a nation of joiners." Max Weber also expressed this opinion: "What is, in qualitative terms, the association-land par excellence? Without doubt America . . ." (1911, p. 53). It is not clear whether he was influenced by Tocque-
VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS: Sociological Aspects ville or Bryce, or by his own observations on his visit to the United States in 1905. In spite of the number of such remarks in the literature of commentary upon American society, and without denying the central importance of voluntary associations in American life, it should be noted that perhaps too much emphasis has been placed upon the scope and uniqueness of the American pattern. The research of Warner and his associates (Warner & Lunt 1941) uncovered 357 associations in Yankee City (pop. 17,000), and Bushee (1945) found 245 associations in Boulder, Colorado (pop. 12,000); but Max Weber (1911) found some three hundred associations in a German city of 30,000 merely by consulting the city directory. The observation is frequently made that voluntary associations are most common in America and the Protestant countries of Europe, and indeed the contrast between the Protestant countries and the Roman Catholic countries is quite marked; but the prevalence of voluntary associations in such different countries as Japan (Norbeck 1962), Nigeria (Little 1965), Ghana (Wallerstein 1964), Thailand (Riggs 1962a), and Israel (Eisenstadt 1956) indicates that the pattern is by no means confined to Protestant countries. The research evidence is scattered, and contradictory claims are common. In France, for example, Rose found that voluntary associations are both few in number and of limited influence (1954b, pp. 50-115), while Gallagher found over three hundred associations in a provincial town of 50,000 (1957). Only in America has sufficient research been undertaken to provide a reasonably accurate picture of the extent of participation in voluntary associations. Alfred O. Hero has summarized much of this research, as follows: The proportion of the population affiliated with organizations varies considerably with the type of community. For example, . . . [a National Opinion Research Center] study of Denver [Colorado] in 1949 reported that 64 per cent said they belonged either to voluntary organizations or to labor unions. Elimination of those who were members of unions probably would have lowered the figure to around 50-55 per cent. Morris Axelrod . . . [1956, pp. 13-18] reported that 37 per cent of Detroit [Michigan] adults were affiliated with neither voluntary associations nor labor unions, that half of the 63 per cent who were affiliated were members of only one, and that a large number of those with only one affiliation were members of unions. . . . When trade unions, religious bodies, and parentteacher associations were excepted, Basil G. Zimmer and Amos H. Hawley [1959, p. 198] reported that only 43 per cent of adults in Flint, Michigan, and 25 per cent in its suburbs and urban fringe areas were affiliated with organizations. Percentages of adults unaffili-
365
ated with organizations (typically including trade unions) reported in other locales have been as follows: Bennington [Vermont]—35 per cent . . . [Scott 1957, pp. 315-326]; Chicago—35 per cent . . . [Goldhamer 1942, p. 20]; Muncie [Indiana]—42 per cent . . . [Lynd & Lynd 1929, p. 308]; Boulder [Colorado]—48 per cent . . . [Bushee 1945, p. 218]; a rural-urban fringe in Oregon—49 per cent . . . [Martin 1952, p. 689]; a small city and environs in Ohio—50 per cent . . . [Lazarsfeld et al. 1944, p. 173]; among employed adults in New York City—52 per cent . . . [Komarovsky 1946, pp. 689-690]; Newburyport [Massachusetts] —59 per cent . . . [Warner & Lunt 1941, p. 329]; Westchester [county in New York]—60 per cent . . . [Lundberg et al. 1934, pp. 129, 136]; and among Marylanders ages 16-25—74 per cent . . . [Bell 1938, p. 168]. (1960, pp. 115-116) The summary has been presented in full in order to demonstrate the difficulties of obtaining comparable data on this topic; in fact, the noncomparability of the data probably accounts for more of the variation from study to study than do the differences in date, location, or type of community. This noncomparability stems in part from variations in the definition of a voluntary association that is explicitly or implicitly used, and in part from the household-interview method used in these studies. Respondents may both fail to recall and seek to impress; thus, interview data underestimate the proportion of American adults who are at least inactive members in associations (which is probably over 75 per cent) and overestimate the proportion who are active members (which is probably somewhat less than 20 per cent). Although this is only an informed guess, it is not without empirical foundation. Babchuk and Edwards, for example, reported that the "Detroit area study" found that 63 per cent of the adult population belonged to voluntary associations, but that of these only 28 per cent had contributed any time to an association in the previous three months (1965, pp. 150-151). Membership in American voluntary associations (and presumably in those in other industrialized countries as well) is not random: some segments of the population are much more likely to participate than are others. Whites are more likely to participate than are Negroes, Jews more likely than Protestants, and Protestants more likely than Roman Catholics; urban and rural nonfarm residents more likely than farm residents; parents more likely than nonparents; frequent voters more likely than nonvoters. The largest and most consistent differences in participation are those in socioeconomic status, whether measured by income, occupation, home ownership, or educational level. A majority of Americans of higher status belong to
366
VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS: Sociological Aspects
voluntary associations, and a majority of people of lower status do not (Wright & Hyman 1958; Hausknecht 1962). Explanations for these patterns of differential membership are not hard to find. Membership in a voluntary association is a form of social interaction, and people who are deprived of a broad range of social interaction (farmers, Negroes, immigrant Roman Catholics, widows) are almost by definition less likely to belong to voluntary associations. More difficult to explain are variations that appear to exist—both in the number of associations and in the proportion of the population that participates—from one society to another. A number of plausible hypotheses have been advanced; they derive from the functions which voluntary associations seem to serve for the individual, for subgroups in society, and for the society as a whole, and they are reviewed in later sections of this article. Classification into types Although it is necessary to discuss spare-time, participatory voluntary associations as a generic type, it must not be assumed that the thousands of such associations which exist in a society are all of one type. On the contrary, the range of variation is probably greater than that which exists among government and business organizations. A variety of typologies has been developed, each useful for a particular purpose. For many purposes a simple classification based upon the stated program or the manifest purpose of the association is sufficient. Hausknecht, for example, in a further analysis of the American data used by Wright and Hyman (1958), developed the eight classifications shown in Table 1. Although the typology in Table 1 gives a broad picture of the patterns of membership, it provides no information about the structure of the associations or the latent functions that they perform; in Table 1 — Distribution of voluntary association members by type of association Type of association
Per cent belonging
Civic and service
38
Lodges and fraternal
31
Church and religious
25
Social and recreational
16
Veterans, military, patriotic
14
Economic, occupational, professional
9
Cultural, educational, alumni
4
Political and pressure Total
4 (853)*
* Percentages add to more than TOO, since some individuals belong to more than one type of association. Source: Adapted from Hausknecht 1962, p. 84.
fact, little is told even about their manifest functions, since there is a great deal of overlap in their activities. Community service activities, for example, are a major part of the program not only of civic associations but also of lodges, church organizations, and veterans' groups. Other classifications which utilize either structure or function as a variable have been developed. Sherwood Fox (1953), for example, examined the functions performed by some five thousand associations and based a classification upon the distinction between majoral, mineral, and medial organizations. Majoral associations are those which serve the interests of the major institutions of society: business, professional, scientific, educational, labor, and agricultural associations. Mineral associations serve the interests of significant minorities in the population: women's clubs, church organizations, hobby clubs, and, above all, ethnic associations. Medial associations mediate between major segments or institutions in the society. For example, parent-teacher associations mediate between the family and the school system; social welfare organizations mediate between those who provide financial or other aid and the underprivileged population; veterans' groups mediate between war veterans and the government; and voluntary health associations mediate between scientists and the public, as well as between individuals suffering from a particular disease and the medical profession. A structural distinction, that between "corporatetype" and "federation-type" organizations, was developed by Sills (1957) to analyze problems of organizational structure and control in national organizations. This distinction has many parallels. Some national states are loose federations of semiautonomous component units, while others are highly centralized [see CENTRALIZATION AND DECENTRALIZATION]. Churches may also be classified in a similar way. At one extreme are "congregational" churches, in which each parish is responsible for its own affairs; at the other extreme are "episcopal" churches, in which ultimate authority resides in the parent organization [see RELIGIOUS ORGANIZATION]. A typology of voluntary associations based upon a structural variable ("accessibility," or w.ho is eligible for membership) and two functional variables ("status-conferring capacity," or the extent to which membership bestows prestige, and "instrumentalexpressive," or whether activities are directed toward the behavior of nonmembers or of members) has been developed by Babchuk and Gordon (1962, p. 38). "Instrumental" associations are generally
VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS: Sociological Aspects termed "interest groups" by political scientists [see INTEREST GROUPS]. Organizational processes Since voluntary associations are a type of formal organization, they exhibit some of the same social processes and social pathologies as do other organizations. The present article will focus upon four processes that are of fundamental importance to an understanding of voluntary associations: institutionalization, minority rule, goal displacement, and goal succession. Institutionalization. In its broadest meaning, institutionalization is the process through which patterns of behavior and expectations of behavior on the part of others become established. Marriage, the market place, and the burying of the dead are all examples of institutions. One feature of an institution in this sense is that it is unplanned: only after it has been established is a pattern termed an institution. As Walton H. Hamilton said of the institution we call feudalism: The feudal regime was an empirical sort of an affair; men of iron lorded it over underlings as they could, yielded to their betters as they were compelled and maintained such law and order as the times allowed; but with its passing its sprawling arrangements and befuddled functions were turned into office and estate ordained of God. (1932, p. 87) As it applies to organizations, institutionalization means the unplanned process that turns a loosely organized group of adherents to an idea or a goal into a formal organization [see SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS, article on THE CONCEPT]. Since it is a social process, institutionalization may be studied at any point on the time continuum that runs from the emergence of an idea to the death of an organization through strangulation by its own rules of procedure. John E. Tsouderos, for example, has studied what he called the formalization process in established organizations. He selected ten voluntary associations and applied time series analysis to five quantitative variables: number of members, total annual income, total annual expenditures, value of organizational property, and number of administrative employees. This analysis revealed two cycles in the history of the associations: a "cycle of growth" and a "cycle of formalization." Membership started to decline at the point that separated these two cycles, annual income started to decline midway in the cycle of formalization, and the other three variables increased slowly through both cycles. As used by Tsouderos, "institutionalization" means essentially "bureaucratization." [See Tsouderos 1955;
367
Chapin & Tsouderos 1956; see also ORGANIZATIONS, article on THEORIES OF ORGANIZATIONS.] Institutionalization may also be studied by examining the processes through which voluntary associations become established as the institutional expressions of social movements. Wendell King (1956), for example, has identified three phases in the "life cycle" of social movements: the incipient phase, in which a handful of believers works toward a goal established by the founder (often a charismatic leader); the organizational phase, in which voluntary associations are established; and the stable phase, in which the voluntary associations (if they survive) become increasingly professionalized, bureaucratic, and conservative. [See CHARISMA; SOCIAL MOVEMENTS.] In spite of analyses such as those of Tsouderos and King, systematic study of the institutionalization process has hardly begun. Much of the interest in the impact of institutionalization and formalization centers on the transformation of organizational goals over time (see "Goal succession," below). What is badly needed is historical research that is guided by organizational theory. A beginning has been made in such research as Sheldon Messinger's study of the growth and decline of the Townsend Movement, a depression-born scheme to restore prosperity in the United States by the government's making monthly payments to the aged (1955); Gusfield's study of the history of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (1955; 1957); and Zald and Denton's study of the transformation of the YMCA from evangelism to general service (1963). Awaiting similar historical analysis are such organizations as the Sons of Liberty and the Committees of Correspondence, two voluntary associations in the early history of the United States that were dissolved when the anti-British purposes for which they were established were achieved through the American Revolution and the establishment of the Continental Congress; the American Anti-Slavery Society, which split through internal dissension and controversy over policy matters some twenty years before the Emancipation Proclamation; and the Indian National Congress, which after India achieved independence became the increasingly conservative Congress party. A third use of the concept of institutionalization regards it not necessarily as a process that develops over time but, rather, as a characteristic that distinguishes between voluntary associations at one point in time. Some voluntary associations have goals and programs that are oriented toward the gradual improvement of the existing order. Their
368
VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS: Sociological Aspects
SOCIAL MOVEMENT-LIKE ASSOCIATIONS
Institute for General Semantics
World Zionist Congress Planned Parenthood
Indian and
Federation of America
African Congresses
/V Association for the Advancement of
Townsend Organization
American
Psychoanalysis
z
Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)
Wilderness Society
O
Committee for
< M
Cultural Freedom
Alcoholics Anonymou National Association for
<
Z
National
the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
u
Conference on Social Welfare
g l__ p 10
American Institute of Planners
z
Temperance Unior (WCTU)
American Parent-teachers associations
u_ O
Woman's Christiar
Jewish Committee
LU 01 O
American Association
Q
for Public Opinion
National
Research (AAPOR)
Adult Education
Foundation
Association
/ \
ASSOCIATIONS
Young Men's Christian
National Association of Social Workers
FORMAL ORGANIZATION-LIKE
League of Women Voters
Association (YMCA) National Federation of
American Society of
Business and Professional
American
American
American
Civil Engineers
Women's Clubs
Cancer Society
Red Cross
Kennel Club
MEMBERSHIP BASE LAYMEN
PROFESSIONALS
Figure 1 — A two-dimensional scheme for classifying voluntary associations'1 The selection of associations is arbitrary and for illustrative purposes only; the location of associations on the figure is approximate and is based upon the author's impressions derived from descriptive or research reports. A vast research project would be required in order to locate associations with any degree of precision.
members therefore bring a relatively low degree of affect to their participation, and the organizational structure is relatively formal and matter-of-fact. Such highly institutionalized organizations may be called formal organization-like associations. Other voluntary associations have goals and programs that are much more radical and ideological, and are more at variance with what the participants believe to be the norms of society; their members bring a relatively high degree of affect to their participation, and the organizational structure is likely to be informal and fluid. These less institutionalized organizations may be called social movement-like associations. Figure 1 presents a two-dimensional scheme for classifying voluntary associations; institutionalization in the sense of "formal organization-like" is one of the dimensions, and the lay-versus-professional base of the membership is the other. Since the associations given as examples in Figure 1 were selected rather arbi-
trarily and for illustrative purposes, there is no attempt to show that there is an absence of correlation between the two dimensions. What is apparent is that a membership base of professionals does not necessarily result in a formal organization-like association, although examples in the upper lefthand quadrant of the figure are relatively hard to find. The scheme shown in Figure 1 is given not as a definite finding of research but, rather, as a heuristic device to demonstrate the potentialities of typologies for generating research hypotheses. Minority rule. Since voluntary associations can exist only in societies in which freedom of association exists, and since such societies are more or less democratic in their ethos and political structure, there is an expectation that members will take an active part in the affairs of the association and that democratic procedures will govern its conduct. This expectation often is not met; although most voluntary associations have constitutions, bylaws, or oral
VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS: Sociological Aspects
369
traditions that call for full participation by the members, the "iron law of oligarchy" formulated by Robert Michels generally has greater weight:
Table 2 — Some determinants of membership inactivity and minority rule in voluntary associations
Organization implies the tendency to oligarchy. In every organization, whether it be a political party, a professional union, or any other association of the kind, the aristocratic tendency manifests itself very clearly. The mechanism of the organization, while conferring a solidarity of structure, induces serious changes in the organized mass, completely inverting the respective position of the leaders and the led. As a result of organization, every party or professional union becomes divided into a minority of directors and a majority of directed. ([1911] 1959, p. 32)
Organizational structure Representative government
Michels was not the first social scientist to comment upon the oligarchic nature of voluntary associations; in fact, by what presumably is merely an interesting coincidence, in the year that Michels' Political Parties was published, Max Weber made a very similar observation: In every . . . organization, whether it be called a party, a society, a club, or whatever, authority in effect always takes the form of minority rule—sometimes the dictatorship of an individual. It is the rule of one or more persons who are qualified by a process of selection or by virtue of their competence to assume the tasks of leadership and who have de facto authority in the organization. (1911, p. 56) It was perhaps Michels' good fortune in adapting Ricardo's striking phrase "the iron law of wages" to his purposes that has made his analysis better known than Weber's. Neither carried his analysis of the determinants of minority rule very far. In a crucial phrase, Michels said it came about "as a result of organization," and Weber wrote of the dominance of "professional personnel." [See the biography of MICHELS.] Critics of minority rule in voluntary associations have often invoked "membership apathy" as an explanation for it. Barber (1950), however, has pointed out that these critics offer no evidence for the existence of apathy as a psychological trait; rather, the sociologist can demonstrate that the social structure of role obligations and the structural needs of the organizations themselves together militate against "complete" participation. Many other social scientists have contributed observations and research findings toward an understanding of the related phenomena of membership inactivity and minority rule; Table 2 summarizes much of this literature. The array of determinants listed in Table 2 is very similar to the array that might be developed to demonstrate the impossibility of the full participation of all citizens in any democracy. Since it is
Locus of the determinant
Illustrative citations Barber 1950, pp.490-491
Large number of members
Michels (1911) 1959, p. 26 Truman 1951, p. 141 Tsouderos 1955, p. 209
Functional specialization
Barber 1950, pp.490-491 Michels (1911), 1959, p. 400
Membership heterogeneity and absence of consensus
Bendixl947, p. 494 Selznick 1952, p. 308 Simon 1947, p. 114
Institutionalization and formalization
Starbuck 1965, pp. 477-480 Tsouderos 1955, p. 209 Weber 1911
Leadership requirements Specialized skills
Barber 1950, pp.490-491 Sills 1957, p. 34
Availability of time
Barber 1950, pp.492-493 Garceau 1941, p. 54
Temperament
Riesman & Glazer 1950 Selznick 1943, p. 52
Organizational activities Absence of concrete tasks
Sills 1957, pp. 36-42
Conflicts with other interests; segmental participation
Barber 1950, p. 486 Selznick 1952, pp. 286-288 Truman 1951, pp. 157-167
Disparity between reasons for joining and organizational activities
Cartwright 1951 Lewin 1948 Rose 1954fc>, p. 64
impossible for all citizens to play active roles, governments are established; through the process of elections, representatives are selected who are empowered to speak for their constituencies. In many democracies, however, full participation in even the basic activity of voting for representatives is not even approximated. Voluntary associations should be different from national societies, it is often claimed, since their members join of their own free will, and in many instances they do have higher participation rates than national states. But similar social-structural determinants serve to depress full participation. Goal displacement. Since voluntary associations —like all organizations—are established for the purpose of realizing some short-term or long-term goal, the study of the relationship of these goals to other aspects of an organization's existence has occupied the attention of many researchers. How goals are established, how decisions are made concerning what activities will serve to realize a goal, how goals are interpreted to the community—these and many other questions are implicit or explicit in research on voluntary associations [see ORGANIZATIONS, article on ORGANIZATIONAL GOALS]. The fact that an organization's charter or statement of purpose contains an explicit description of
370
VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS: Sociological Aspects
the goals it is to pursue is no guarantee that the organization's procedures will be single-mindedly directed toward these ends. In fact, it is the procedures themselves that often serve to deflect the organization from its goals: The generic problem of goal preservation may be stated as follows: In order to accomplish their goals, organizations establish a set of procedures or means. In the course of following these procedures, however, the subordinates or members to whom authority and functions have been delegated often come to regard them as ends in themselves, rather than as means toward the achievement of organizational goals. As a result of this process, the actual activities of the organization become centered around the proper functioning of organization procedures, rather than upon the achievement of the initial goals. (Sills 1957, p. 62) The analysis of the phenomenon called goal displacement has occupied the attention of many sociologists—from Michels and Weber to Blau, Gouldner, Lipset, Merton, and Selznick; a summary of this research tradition is given elsewhere (Sills 1957, pp. 62-77) and need not be repeated in detail here. One source of goal displacement is the desire of active participants to retain high status positions in the organization; in order to do this, they tend to focus their activities upon self-serving rather than goal-directed activities. Perhaps the most striking example is that of leaders of labor unions, who are understandably reluctant to forfeit their status and income in order to "go back to the bench." A second source of goal displacement lies in the strict enforcement of organizational rules and the slavish carrying out of organizational procedures. The sentiments that are developed to buttress the rules and perform the procedures often become more intense than is technically necessary; following the rules and carrying out the procedures become ends in themselves. The informal structures that develop within organizations are a third source of goal displacement. Hundreds of studies, starting with the famous research at the Hawthorne Works of the Western Electric Company in Chicago in the years 1927 to 1932 (Roethlisberger & Dickson 1939), have demonstrated that informally created groups within organizations are not only crucial to goal achievement but are also—for example, through the informal establishment of production norms that are lower than those desired by management—responsible for a certain amount of goal displacement. [See GROUPS, article on THE STUDY OF GROUPS'; INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS, article on HUMAN RELATIONS.]
Goal succession. The literature on the two major pathologies of voluntary associations, the tendency toward oligarchy and the displacement of goals, leads to fundamentally pessimistic conclusions. In spite of the best of intentions, these writers say, the inherent nature of the process of organization is such that minorities will gain control in order to serve their own ends; as a result, the purposes for which the organization is established will be blunted. The two major landmarks in this literature illustrate the point. Michels' Political Parties (1911) concludes that the prospects for democracy in social democratic parties and labor unions are dim. Selznick's TVA and the Grass Roots (1949) concludes that the TVA's delegation of certain phases of its agricultural program to local organizations led to these organizations' being "co-opted" into the policy-making apparatus of the TVA itself, which in turn caused the TVA to be deflected from some of its major goals. These pessimistic conclusions have not gone unchallenged. For instance, Bendix has pointed out that if the supposed iron law of oligarchy is to prevail in an organization, there must be dissensus among its members: It is ... misleading to assume that a ruling clique can deliberately prevent the "success" of an organization, while everybody else agrees on the methods and desirability of achieving it. Rather, an organized minority can maintain its power and it can make its idea of success prevail, as long as disagreement is widespread both with regard to the meaning of "success" and to the methods by which it is to be achieved. (1947, p. 494) And Lipset, while concluding on the basis of his study of a "deviant case" (a democratically controlled labor union) that "the functional requirements for democracy cannot be met most of the time in most unions" (1954, p. 121), also concluded that democracy is not a functional prerequisite of effectiveness: "Even the most dictatorial union is a better protector of workers' economic interests and of political democracy within the larger society, than no union, provided that the union is not a tool either of the state or of the employer" (ibid., p. 122). The recurrent theme in the vast commentary upon the "iron law of oligarchy" is that the law holds true only under certain circumstances, and even when it does hold true, other democratic values may nevertheless be furthered. In a frontal attack upon those who see only tragedy in the processes of organization, Gouldner asserted that "there is every reason to assume that 'the underlying tendencies which are likely to inhibit the democratic process' are just as likely to impair authoritarian
VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS: Sociological Aspects
371
Table 3 — Selected aspects of the organizational adaptation of four voluntary associations* UNSUCCESSFUL ORGANIZATIONS Woman's Christian Temperance Union Initial goal
SUCCESSFUL ORGANIZATIONS
Townsend Organization
Young Men's Christian Association
American National Red Cross Mitigate suffering
Encourage
National pensions
Improve the
abstinence,
for the aged to
spiritual, mental,
during wars and
particularly
alleviate economic
and social condi-
other calamities
among lower-
dislocation
tion of young men
None
Physical education
class people Additional or
Improve the
secondary goal
welfare of
agency of the gov-
lower-class
ernment, directing
people
voluntary aid to
Serve as chartered
sick and wounded during time of war Characteristics of original membership
Upper-middleand middle-class
Mostly elderly
Lay leadership
Largely upper-
men and women
Middle-class,
and upper-
Protestant
middle-class
membership of
men and women
young men Environmental
Increased
End of the
Secularization
End of World War I
changes requiring
permissiveness
depression
of society
and World War II
adaptation
of drinking
Private pension
Emergence of new
Organizational
norms in middle-
plans
concepts concern-
structure and
ing personality
financing too great
class groups
development and
for disaster relief
character
only
development
Increased governmental disaster relief
New or added
Express moral
Provide recrea-
Increased empha-
Public health
goals
indignation
tion for the aged
sis upon social and
activities
Censure the
Maintain the
athletic activities
Blood donor
new middle class
organization by
Less emphasis
program
upon evangelical
retail sales
activities Consequences for
Lower-middle-
End of effective
Membership broad-
Increased size
the organization
and lower-class
recruiting
ened to include
and influence
membership
Sharp decline
boys, women,
More successful
No change in size
in membership
non-Protestants
peacetime fund
"An organization
Professional
raising
in retreat"
leadership Emphasis upon buildings
An analysis of these four associations may be found in Sills 1957, pp. 258-264. Sources: Woman's Christian Temperance Union: Gusfield 1955; 1957; Townsend Organization: Messinger 1955; Young Men's Christian Association: Pence 1939; Zald & Denton 1963; American National Red Cross: Dulles 1950.
rule. . . . There cannot be an iron law of oligarchy . . . unless there is an iron law of democracy" ([1955] 1961, p. 80). Similarly, the literature of criticism of the concept of goal displacement admits the existence of the pathology but points out that the new goals may be an improvement upon the old ones. Peter Blau's study of bureaucracy in two government agencies is the first landmark in this revisionist literature. He observed that the agencies did
not necessarily behave in a rigid, "bureaucratic" way when their goals were achieved or made irrelevant by events; rather, they shifted toward new goals. Blau called this process the "succession of goals," and described it as follows: The attainment of organizational objectives generates a strain toward finding new objectives. To provide incentives for its members and to justify its existence, an organization has to adopt new goals as its old ones are realized. (1955, p. 243 in the 1964 edition)
372
VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS: Sociological Aspects
The attainment of an organization's objectives— in any clear-cut sense—is a relatively rare event; consequently, there have been few studies of the consequences of success for an organization. An exception is Sills' study of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, carried out on the eve of the elimination of infantile paralysis as a threatening disease because of the development of the Salk vaccine. His conclusion, that "the Foundation will in the future make a successful adjustment to the achievement of its major goal . . . [because] the organization has in fact already been transformed, in large part by its Volunteers, into something other than a special purpose association" (1957, p. 270) has been borne out by events. In 1967 the foundation was still a successful voluntary health association, concentrating upon research into and treatment of birth defects. More commonly—although there have been very few studies of such situations—an organization's environment changes in such a way as to make its goals irrelevant or unobtainable. Table 3 summarizes the relevant findings of studies of four organizations that have had to cope with such changes: two unsuccessful organizations (the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the Townsend Organization) and two successful organizations (the YMCA and the American National Red Cross). Since these data are fragmentary and subject to all the limitations that apply to the casestudy method, they cannot be used as a basis for specifying the conditions under which voluntary associations do and do not adjust to environmental conditions. What they do suggest, however, is the value of comparative research into organizational goal succession. Functions for individuals and society The functions that voluntary associations are said to perform for individuals and for society may be broadly classed into two groups: manifest (those which are intended and recognized by the participants) and latent (those which are neither intended nor recognized by the participants, but can be observed by the social scientist). Both types of functions are important, and each presents problems of verification; by far the most challenging problems are those presented by latent functions [see FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS, article on VARIETIES OF FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS].
The literature on voluntary associations is filled with assertions about the latent functions that they perform. How may such assertions be verified? Ideally, comparable situations should be studied in which a given kind of voluntary association is and
is not present. If the observed function were to be performed in the former situation but not in the latter, then there would be a presumption that the voluntary association was the crucial element in the situation. The difficulties involved in verification of this type are enormous, since it is seldom possible to approach the conditions of a controlled experiment, that is, to assign populations to the two situations at random and to hold other factors constant. [Social processes that occur within voluntary associations may be studied by field or laboratory experiments; see Weick 1965; Zelditch & Hopkins 1961; see also EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN; GROUPS; SOCIOMETRY.] For this reason, latent functions must be accepted largely on the basis of their "logical" character—that is, through "mental experimentation"—and on the basis of the absence of any conflicting evidence. Historical analysis is another method of overcoming the difficulties of creating experimental designs; that is, methods of establishing causal relations that are adequate for a historical explanation are, logically, adequate for a functional explanation. The criteria for accepting historical explanations as adequate, however, are much in dispute. [For an example of the value of historical research for the study of voluntary associations, see Lipset 1950; for the views of two historians, see HISTORIOGRAPHY, article on THE RHETORIC OF HISTORY; HlSTORY, article OU SOCIAL
HISTORY.] So-called field studies or case studies, with all of their limitations (see Scott 1965), are by far the most common method of research into voluntary associations, and most of the functions described in this article are based upon field observations tested—in varying degrees-—by comparative analysis (see Udy 1965 for discussion of the usefulness of the comparative method in the study of organizations). Functions for individuals. The notion that individuals seek out and join a voluntary association in order to find an outlet for an interest is oversimplified, since there is considerable evidence that most individuals join an association only after they are urged or invited to do so (see, for example, Sills 1957, pp. 78-115). Nevertheless, after they become members, it may be presumed that individuals benefit to some extent from the organization's program, whether it be the satisfactions of sociability, recreation, service, or political action. Manifest functions of this kind, important as they are, require no explanation here. Rather, attention will be given to two latent functions of participation: social integration and training in organizational skills. In assessing the findings that are reported, it
VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS: Sociological Aspects must be remembered that much of the evidence has been obtained from participants rather than from both participants and nonparticipants. The researcher is faced with the same problem of self-selection that plagues students of communication : since people expose themselves to televised speeches and newspaper and magazine articles (to say nothing of church sermons) with which they are already in basic agreement, it is often difficult to detect changes in opinion through audience research. Similarly, the minority in a society that is active in voluntary associations tends to be selfselected in ways that minimize the chances of the activity's having a measurable impact upon them. This problem is of course compounded by the difficulty of measuring changes in individuals and isolating the influences that brought them about. Social integration. That people interact with others when they participate in a voluntary association is rather obvious, and it may be assumed that the benefits of interaction—easing loneliness, learning norms, acquiring information—are among the most frequent functions of membership for the individuals involved. What is more problematic is whether—to use Cooley's terms—secondary groups such as voluntary associations serve the same integrative functions as primary groups. Wirth (1938, p. 20) and many others have expressed the view that the weakness of family and neighborhood ties in modern (or urban) society is compensated for by participation in voluntary associations, but such statements do not constitute proof. The research evidence from studies of American society is inconclusive (see, for example, Babchuk & Edwards 1965, in which material on many kinds of associations is reviewed). There is no doubt that some people achieve family-like satisfactions from participation; this is most true of lodges, fraternal orders, and such self-help associations as Alcoholics Anonymous. In most other associations, however, the segmental, part-time, and task-oriented nature of the activity precludes the development of true primary-group ties. What is much more likely is that people who have satisfactory primary-group ties are more likely to join voluntary associations—a reversal of the direction of causality implied by the integration hypothesis. There is considerable evidence that this is so; for example, Jacoby (1965, p. 166) found that persons with primary-group ties (that is, persons who are living with others) are more likely to join expressive associations than are persons living alone. One explanation for the absence of evidence of integrative functions in the United States is that
373
it is a relatively integrated society, in which the family and the neighborhood continue to fulfill their historic functions. Janowitz (1952), for example, has explicitly challenged Wirth's assertions about the anonymity of urban life by describing how the residents of Chicago (the nation's second largest city, and the same city that Wirth studied) are bound to family and neighborhood groups. In another statement in this continuing debate, Kornhauser pointed out that the evidence of the survival of primary groups in a mass society is not in itself very significant; the groups may persist, but their functions may be considerably weakened. For example, primary-group ties may be more easily broken because they receive less support from the institutional structure of society [see MASS SOCIETY]. The extent to which voluntary associations serve social integrative functions in industrial societies has not as yet been satisfactorily measured. Much the same can be said for this role of voluntary associations in the developing countries, although there are grounds for assuming that voluntary associations are more important in this respect in societies that are in a stage of rapid detribalization and urbanization. Wallerstein, for example, noted that throughout tropical Africa in the postcolonial era "new voluntary associations sprang up to perform the services that the tribe, the family, and the government could not perform" (1964, p. 320). Training in organizational skills. The social skills necessary for an individual to function effectively in an organization—serving as a committee member, writing minutes and reports, following Robert's Rules of Order—are learned not at all in the family setting and only imperfectly in the school system. Yet it is precisely these skills that a democracy requires of large numbers of people if positions of power are to be rotated. Inspection of the campaign literature circulated by candidates for posts ranging from village trustee to senator reveals the importance placed by the candidates upon the associations of which they are members. Although candidates list these affiliations to demonstrate their dedication to the community welfare, the lists also serve as certificates of organizational skill. Consider, for example, the city of Lincoln, Nebraska (pop. 150,000), described by Babchuk and Edwards (1965, p. 160). After intensive study they concluded that there were over two thousand voluntary associations in that city that met regularly during the year. Since each association had at least one officer, and many had several plus a committee structure of some kind, the total number
374
VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS: Sociological Aspects
of residents who received some training in organizational skills in the course of a year is impressive. Here is an example of the reverse of what economists call economies of scale: the more fragmented the organizational structure is, the more individuals are trained. In societies that are undergoing the transition from tribalism to modernism, the impact of such training is even more dramatic. As Wallerstein (1964) has described in detail, the voluntary associations in tropical Africa that the colonial powers had encouraged as a means of spreading modern values became in the end effective instruments of liberation: the presidents of debating societies and football associations became through these experiences trained leaders of anticolonial movements. Functions for society. There is necessarily some overlap between functions that voluntary associations perform for individuals and those that they perform for society. For example, the training of individuals in organizational skills not only provides satisfactions for them and enables them to advance their careers; it also provides the total society with fresh cadres of leaders who have new perspectives on problems, thereby stimulating social change. The distinction is an important one analytically, however, since a function that may benefit individuals (e.g., through opportunities for self-expression) may be detrimental to society (e.g., if self-expression takes the form of violence). Even in the more frequent instances of functions being beneficial for both individuals and society, this distinction is necessary [see FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS, article on STRUCTURAL-FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS], Since the range of organizations encompassed by the term "voluntary association" is so broad, some rather stringent limits must be placed upon a discussion of the functions of voluntary associations for society. Even with self-imposed limitations the task is formidable, which perhaps explains the absence of any synthetic discussion of the topic in the sociological literature. Most writers on voluntary associations have devoted a few sentences or paragraphs to the topic; no one has provided an extensive treatment. The discussion in this section focuses upon six functions that voluntary associations are said to serve for society. As in the case of functions for individuals, the evidence that these functions are actually performed is uneven, and the problems of verification are largely unsolved. It is noteworthy that the functions described are all positive; few students of voluntary associations have pointed out any dysfunctions. An exception to this generalization is the effect that voluntary associations have
on social mobility; although most American researchers have concluded that voluntary associations either provide avenues for upward social mobility or at least confirm prestige earned in other ways, a number of British studies have indicated that the class-based membership of many voluntary associations erects barriers to upward social mobility (Morris 1965, p. 200). Mediation. The term "secondary groups," as it applies to voluntary associations, indicates that associations mediate between primary groups and the state (the extent to which this mediation has meaning for the individuals involved is discussed in the previous section). It is much easier to demonstrate the mediation function of voluntary associations if concrete kinds of organizations are mentioned. Professional associations mediate between their membership and the government, especially in such matters as licensing, research funds, and legislation: in these areas, mediation shades off into lobbying. Through their public relations and public information programs, professional associations mediate between their membership and the general public. In national churches, both local and special-interest organizations are voluntary associations that mediate between the individual members and the hierarchy. (Other examples of mediating functions are given in the section "Classification into types.") Integration of subgroups. In plural societies, voluntary associations may serve to integrate minority groups into the national society. In fact, many ethnic associations are formed for this express purpose—for instance, the Water Level Society in Japan (an association of the eta that seeks to raise this outcaste group to the level of the national society), or the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the United States. Many ethnic associations are formed for the purpose of maintaining ethnic identity, but, as Mary B. Treudley demonstrated in her study of Greek-American associations in Boston, a more frequent result is "the transformation of peasants into citizens" ([1949a] 1966, p. 59). The success of such organizations can lead to their own disintegration; thus Kurt Lewin pointed out, with specific reference to American Jewish organizations, that "the task of organizing a group which is economically or otherwise underprivileged is seriously hampered by those members whose real goal is to leave the group rather than promote it" ([1948] 1950, p. 193). Affirmation of values. Voluntary associations may serve as a legitimate locus for the affirmation and expression of values, as do patriotic societies and political parties. Tocqueville recognized the
VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS: Sociological Aspects dangers to a society inherent in "the unrestrained liberty of association," but he also recognized the positive aspects of overt organizations: This perilous liberty offers a security against dangers of another kind; in countries where associations are free, secret societies are unknown. In America there are factions, but no conspiracies. ([1835] 1945, vol. 1, pp. 202-203) Governing. It was noted above that the uniqueness of the American pattern of voluntary associations has been overstated by many observers: many other countries have large numbers of active associations. What is difficult to overstate, however, is the part played by voluntary associations in the actual business of governing the United States, in the sense of making decisions on policy and of providing services to citizens. Tocqueville was impressed by this: "Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association" ([1835] 1945, vol. 2, p. 114). Rossi concluded, on the basis of a study of the leadership of a Midwestern industrial city of about 45,000 that he named Mediana, that this pattern is, if anything, more prevalent today than it was at the time of Tocqueville's visit: The most striking characteristic of contemporary cities, compared with the American community in the nineteenth century, is the relative drop in the importance of local government, not only in its relation to state and federal governments but also in its relation to local voluntary associations. To understand what is happening within a contemporary community an investigator cannot confine himself to the official table of organization for municipal government but must add to it a host of voluntary associations which act on behalf of the community and which together with the formal structure of local government form the basic organizational framework of the local community. (Rossi 1961, p. 301) The nature and importance of voluntary association activity in community decision making probably varies with the size of the community, although to my knowledge there are no data to support this observation. In large cities, voluntary associations seem to serve largely as important pressure groups; in medium-sized cities they virtually run the municipal government. Thus, according to Rossi, "There is a saying in Mediana to the effect that Rotary owns the town, Kiwanis runs it, and the Jaycees do all the leg work" (1961, p. 309). In small towns the decision-making role is filled by families and cliques, leaving to voluntary associations such service tasks as raising funds for the library, decorating the plaza, and maintaining the cemeteries. Throughout most of America—in fact,
375
almost everywhere except in large cities—voluntary associations perform the fundamentally governmental function of coping with emergencies: sickness is treated in voluntary health centers and hospitals; fires are fought by volunteer fire departments; disaster relief is furnished through the American Red Cross. This pattern is, of course, not confined to America: community service organizations are found in many countries. In Florence, for example, although Italy is not known for the importance of its secular voluntary associations, a voluntary association provides the major ambulance service. The governmental functions performed by voluntary associations at the state and local level are also important. The organizational machinery for the licensing of such professionals as lawyers and physicians, for example, is generally run by voluntary professional societies. Throughout the federal government, agencies rely upon voluntary associations not only for research and training services, and for carrying out public information campaigns, but also, in many cases, for the actual administration of the agency's program. Examples are the services provided by the National Travelers Aid Association to the Department of Labor, the services of the Institute of International Education and many other organizations to the foreign student program of the Department of State, and the hundreds of community action agencies that carry out the antipoverty program of the Office of Economic Opportunity. In a review of the financial and policy problems generated by the delegation of governmental functions to voluntary associations, Alan Pifer concluded that "the use of nongovernmental organizations to carry out public functions, a rare occurrence before World War n, is now accepted policy in most parts of government" (1966, p. 4). Initiating social change. Since most voluntary associations are formed for the purpose of bringing about some change in society, and since most have had some measure of success in this, it follows that the initiation of social change is one of their major functions for society. The limiting case of social change—revolution—demonstrates the point: historically, revolutions either have been started by voluntary associations or have been directed by them once mass unrest led to outbursts of violence [see REVOLUTION]. In many countries, most of the services that are now assumed to be the responsibility of government were initiated by voluntary associations. This is particularly true of welfare services to the poor, the ill, the orphaned, and the aged, but it is also true of such services as education. In many of the developing countries, for example, the present pub-
376
VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS: Sociological Aspects
lie school system is modeled after schools established by missionary societies, and these societies often continue to sponsor the secondary schools in which many members of the future elite are trained. This pattern is not confined to non-Western societies: the public school system of New York City, for example, is the successor to a voluntary association—the Public School Society. The prevalence of the pattern in which voluntary associations initiate functions that are subsequently assumed by the government raises the question of whether the widespread utilization of voluntary associations is a permanent feature of Western society or merely a transitional phase between inactive governments and the welfare state. This question was seriously examined by a number of groups in postwar Britain when the Labour government assumed responsibility for many welfare programs previously carried out by voluntary associations (see, for example, Beveridge & Wells 1949). The conclusion reached as a result of these inquiries was that voluntary activities in the welfare field would undoubtedly diminish in importance but would not disappear. In the United States, the assumption of broader welfare responsibilities on the part of the federal (as well as state) government has undoubtedly been beneficial to voluntary health and welfare agencies, since governmental funds are a welcome supplement to gifts made by individuals and private foundations. [See PLANNING, SOCIAL, article on WELFARE PLANNING.] Distributing power. The doctrine of political pluralism, which asserts that the power of the sovereign state must be balanced by the power of dispersed associations, is generally said to have had its origin around the turn of the century in the writings of Durkheim, Figgis, Gierke, Maitland, and others. It was Tocqueville, however, who gave classic expression to the notion that the power of the sovereign state is best limited by voluntary associations. The book Union Democracy (Lipset et al. 1956), on one level a case study of a democratically controlled trade union, is, on a much broader level, an elaboration of ideas first expressed by Tocqueville in Democracy in America. Here is Lipset's summary of Tocqueville's contribution to an understanding of this aspect of the function of voluntary associations: His study of America suggested to him two institutions which might combat the new Leviathan [a powerful state ruling an apathetic mass society]: local selfgovernment and voluntary associations. Involvement in such institutions seemed to him a basic condition for the stability of the democratic political system. By
disseminating ideas and creating consensus among their members, they create the basis for conflict between one organization and another. And, in the process of doing so, they also fulfill certain other roles: they limit the central power, they create new and autonomous centers of power to compete with it, and they help to train potential opposition leaders in politically relevant skills. (1959, p. 88) To test this theory of Tocqueville's would require a vast research program—a program that is well under way in the 1960s through the research of organizational sociologists, political sociologists, and political scientists. There is widespread agreement among these scholars that the two societal trends that have characterized the twentieth century will continue: the extension of social and economic equality and the centralization of power in the hands of government and large organizations. If these trends are not to lead to an Orwellian mass society, new sources of power must be created and maintained. As Tocqueville formulated the problem: Among the laws that rule human societies there is one which seems to be more precise and clear than all others. If men are to remain civilized or to become so, the art of associating together must grow and improve in the same ratio in which the equality of conditions is increased. ([1835] 1945, vol. 2, p. 118) By stating the relationship between power and equality in the form of a scientific law, Tocqueville earned the right to be called one of the first truly modern social scientists. DAVID L. SILLS [See also AGING; ANGLO-AMERICAN SOCIETY; CITY; COMMUNITY; CONSTITUTIONAL LAW, article on CIVIL LIBERTIES; COOPERATION; INTEGRATION, article on SOCIAL INTEGRATION; LEISURE; MEDICAL CARE; MlLLENARISM; NEIGHBORHOOD; ORGANIZATIONS, article On METHODS OF RESEARCH; RELIGIOUS ORGANIZATION;
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS; and the biographies of COLE, G. D. H.; COOLEY; DURKHEIM; FlGGIS; GlERKE; KROPOTKIN; LASKI; LlNDSAY; LuNDBERG; MAITLAND; MICHELS; TOCQUEVILLE.] BIBLIOGRAPHY ANDERSON, ROBERT T.; and ANDERSON, GALLATIN 1958 Voluntary Associations and Urbanization: A Diachronic Analysis. American Journal of Sociology 65: 265-273. ANDERSON, ROBERT T.; and ANDERSON, GALLATIN 1962 The Indirect Social Structure of European Village Communities. American Anthropologist New Series 64:1016-1027. AXELROD, MORRIS 1956 Urban Structure and Social Participation. American Sociological Review 21:13-18. BABCHUK, NICHOLAS; and EDWARDS, JOHN N. 1965 Voluntary Associations and the Integration Hypothesis. Sociological Inquiry 35:149-162.
VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS: Sociological Aspects BABCHUK, NICHOLAS; and GORDON, C. WAYNE 1962 The Voluntary Association in the Slum. University of Nebraska Studies, New Series, No. 27. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press. BANFIELD, EDWARD C. 1958 The Moral Basis of a Backward Society. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. BARBER, BERNARD 1949 Mass Apathy and Voluntary Social Participation in the United States. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard Univ. BARBER, BERNARD 1950 Participation and Mass Apathy in Associations. Pages 477-504 in Alvin W. Gouldner (editor), Studies in Leadership: Leadership and Democratic Action. New York: Harper. BEAL, GEORGE M. et al. 1967 System Linkages Among Women's Organizations. Rural Sociology Report No. 42. Ames: Iowa State Univ., Department of Sociology and Anthropology. -> Makes extensive use of sociometric analysis. BELL, HOWARD M. 1938 Youth Tell Their Story. Washington: American Council on Education. BENDIX, REINHARD 1947 Bureaucracy: The Problem and Its Setting. American Sociological Review 12:493-507. BEVERIDGE, W. H. ; and WELLS, A. F. (editors) 1949 The Evidence for Voluntary Action. London: Allen & Unwin. BLAU, PETER M. (1955) 1963 The Dynamics of Bureaucracy: A Study of Interpersonal Relations in Two Government Agencies. Rev. ed. Univ. of Chicago Press. BRYCE, JAMES (1888) 1933 The American Commonwealth. Volume 2. New ed., rev. New York: Macmillan. BUSHEE, FREDERICK A. 1945 Social Organizations in a Small City. American Journal of Sociology 51:217226. CARTWRIGHT, DORWIN 1951 Achieving Change in People: Some Applications of Group Dynamics Theory. Human Relations 4:381-392. CHAPIN, F. STUART; and TSOUDEROS, JOHN E. 1956 The Formalization Process in Voluntary Associations. Social Forces 34:342-344. CLARK, S. D. 1948 Church and Sect in Canada. Univ. of Toronto Press. DIAMOND, SIGMUND 1958 From Organization to Society: Virginia in the Seventeenth Century. American Journal of Sociology 63:457-475. DULLES, FOSTER R. 1950 The American Red Cross: A History. New York: Harper. EISENSTADT, SHMUEL N. 1956 The Social Conditions of the Development of Voluntary Association: A Case Study of Israel. Eliezer Kaplan School of Economics and Social Sciences, Scripta hierosolymitana 3:104125. Encyclopedia of Associations. 4th ed. 2 vols. 1964 Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research Co. -> A comprehensive directory. ETZIONI, AMITAI (editor) 1961 Complex Organizations: A Sociological Reader. New York: Holt. FIGGIS, JOHN NEVILLE (1913) 1914 Churches in the Modern State. 2d ed. London and New York: Longmans. Fox, SHERWOOD D. 1953 Voluntary Associations and Social Structure. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard Univ. FREEMAN, HOWARD E.; NOVAK, EDWIN; and REEDER, LEO G. 1957 Correlates of Membership in Voluntary Associations. American Sociological Review 22, no. 5:528533. GALLAGHER, ORVOELL R. 1957 Voluntary Associations in France. Social Forces 36:153-160.
377
GARCEAU, OLIVER (1941) 1961 The Political Life of the American Medical Association. Hamden, Conn.: Shoe String Press. GLASER, WILLIAM A.; and SILLS, DAVID L. (editors) 1966 The Government of Associations: Selections From the Behavioral Sciences. Totowa, N.J.: Bedminster. GOLDHAMER, HERBERT 1942 Some Factors Affecting Participation in Voluntary Associations. Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of Chicago. GORDON, C. WAYNE; and BABCHUK, NICHOLAS 1959 A Typology of Voluntary Associations. American Sociological Review 24, no. 1:22-29. GOULDNER, ALVIN W. (1955)1961 Metaphysical Pathos and the Theory of Bureaucracy. Pages 71-82 in Amitai Etzioni (editor), Complex Organizations: A Sociological Reader. New York: Holt. ->• First published in Volume 49 of the American Political Science Review. GUSFIELD, JOSEPH R. 1955 Social Structure and Moral Reform: A Study of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. American Journal of Sociology 61:221232. GUSFIELD, JOSEPH R. 1957 The Problem of Generations in an Organizational Structure. Social Forces 35:323330. HAMILTON, WALTON H. 1932 Institution. Volume 8, pages 84-89 in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences. New York: Macmillan. HAUSKNECHT, MURRAY 1962 The Joiners: A Sociological Description of Voluntary Association Membership in the United States. Totowa, N.J.: Bedminster. HERO, ALFRED O. 1960 Voluntary Organizations in World-affairs Communication. Studies in Citizen Participation in International Relations, Vol. 5. Boston: World Peace Foundation. JACOBY, ARTHUR P. 1965 Some Correlates of Instrumental and Expressive Orientations to Associational Membership. Sociological Inquiry 35:163-175. JANOWITZ, MORRIS 1952 The Community Press in an Urban Setting. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. KATZ, ELIHU; and EISENSTADT, SHMUEL N. 1960 Some Sociological Observations on the Response of Israeli Organizations to New Immigrants. Administrative Science Quarterly 5:113-133. KING, C. WENDELL 1956 Social Movements in the United States. New York: Random House. KOMAROVSKY, MIRRA 1946 The Voluntary Associations of Urban Dwellers. American Sociological Review 11: 686-698. KORNHAUSER, WILLIAM 1959 The Politics of Mass Society. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. LASKI, HAROLD J. 1931 Freedom of Association. Volume 6, pages 447-450 in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences. New York: Macmillan. LAZARSFELD, PAUL F.; BERELSON, BERNARD; and GAUDET, HAZEL (1944) 1960 The People's Choice: How the Voter Makes up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign. 2d ed. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. LEWIN, KURT (1948) 1950 The Problem of Minority Leadership. Pages 192-194 in Alvin W. Gouldner (editor), Studies in Leadership: Leadership and Democratic Action. New York: Harper. -> First published in Lewin's Resolving Social Conflicts. LINDSAY, A. D. (1943) 1959 The Modern Democratic State. Volume 1. Oxford Univ. Press. LIPSET, SEYMOUR M. 1950 Agrarian Socialism; The Cooperative Commonwealth Federation in Saskatchewan:
378
VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS: Sociological Aspects
A Study in Political Sociology. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press. LIPSET, SEYMOUR M. (1954)1960 The Political Process in Trade-unions. Pages 357-397 in Seymour M. Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. -» First published in Freedom and Control in Modern Society, edited by Morroe Berger, Theodore Abel, and Charles H. Page. LIPSET, SEYMOUR M. (1959) 1962 Political Sociology. Pages 81-114 in American Sociological Society, Sociology Today: Problems and Prospects. Edited by Robert K. Merton, Leonard Broom, and Leonard S. Cottrell, Jr. New York: Basic Books. LIPSET, SEYMOUR M.; TROW, MARTIN A,; and COLEMAN, JAMES S. 1956 Union Democracy: The Internal Politics of the International Typographical Union. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. -> A paperback edition was published in 1962 by Doubleday. LITTLE, KENNETH 1965 West African Urbanization: A Study of Voluntary Associations in Social Change. Cambridge Univ. Press. LUNDBERG, GEORGE A. et al. 1934 Leisure: A Suburban Study. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. LYND, ROBERT S.; and LYND, HELEN M. (1929) 1930 Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture. New York: Harcourt. -> A paperback edition was published in 1959. MARTIN, WALTER T. 1952 A Consideration of Differences in the Extent and Location of Formal Associational Activities of Rural-Urban Fringe Residents. American Sociological Review 17:687-694. MESSINGER, SHELDON L. 1955 Organizational Transformation: A Case Study of a Declining Social Movement. American Sociological Review 20:3-10. MICHELS, ROBERT (1911) 1959 Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy. New York: Dover. -> First published as Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der modernen Demokratie. Another paperback edition was published in 1966 by Collier. MISHNUN, FLORENCE 1934 Voluntary Associations. Volume 15, pages 283-287 in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences. New York: Macmillan. MORRIS, RAYMOND N. 1965 British and American Research on Voluntary Associations: A Comparison. Sociological Inquiry 35:186-200. NORBECK, EDWARD 1962 Common Interest Associations in Rural Japan. Pages 73-83 in Pacific Science Congress, 10th, Honolulu, 1961, Japanese Culture: Its Development and Character. Edited by Robert J. Smith and Richard K. Beardsley. Chicago: Aldine. PENCE, OWEN E. 1939 The Y.M.C.A. and Social Need: A Study of Institutional Adaptation. New York: Association Press. PIFER, ALAN 1966 The Nongovernmental Organization at Bay. Pages 1—15 in Carnegie Corporation of New York, Annual Report, 1966. New York: The Corporation. REIN, MARTIN (1961)1966 The Transition From Social Movement to Organization. Pages 17-22 in William A. Glaser and David L. Sills (editors), The Government of Associations: Selections From the Behavioral Sciences. Totowa, NJ.: Bedminster. -> An abridged version of a (Brandeis University) PH.D. dissertation entitled "An Organizational Analysis of a National Agency's Local Affiliates in Their Community Con-
texts: A Study of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America." RIESMAN, DAVID; and GLAZER, NATHAN 1950 Criteria for Political Apathy. Pages 505-559 in Alvin W. Gouldner (editor), Studies in Leadership: Leadership and Democratic Action. New York: Harper. RIGGS, FRED W. 1962a Interest and Clientele Groups. Pages 153-191 in Indiana University, Institute of Training for Public Service, Problems of Politics and Administration in Thailand. Edited by Joseph Sutton. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. RIGGS, FRED W. 1962& The Prevalence of "Clects." American Behavioral Scientist 5, no. 10:15—18. ROETHLISBERGER,
FRITZ
J.;
and
DlCKSON,
WILLIAM
J.
(1939) 1961 Management and the Worker: An Account of a Research Program Conducted by the Western Electric Company, Hawthorne Works, Chicago. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. -» A paperback edition was published in 1964 by Wiley. ROSE, ARNOLD M. (1954a) 1966 Some Functions of Voluntary Associations. Pages 57-58 in William A. Glaser and David L. Sills (editors), The Government of Associations: Selections From the Behavioral Sciences. Totowa, N.J.: Bedminster. -> First published in Rose's Theory and Method in the Social Sciences. ROSE, ARNOLD M. 1954& Theory and Method in the Social Sciences. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press. ROSE, ARNOLD M. 1960 The Impact of Aging on Voluntary Associations. Pages 666-697 in Clark Tibbitts (editor), Handbook of Social Gerontology. Univ. of Chicago Press. Rossi, PETER H. 1961 The Organizational Structure of an American City. Pages 301-311 in Amitai Etzioni (editor), Complex Organizations: A Sociological Reader. New York: Holt. SCHLESINGER, ARTHUR M. SR. 1944 Biography of a Nation of Joiners. American Historical Review 50:1-25. SCOTT, JOHN C. JR. 1957 Membership and Participation in Voluntary Associations. American Sociological Review 22:315-326. SCOTT, W. RICHARD 1965 Field Methods in the Study of Organizations. Pages 261-304 in James G. March (editor), Handbook of Organizations. Chicago: Rand McNally. SELZNICK, PHILIP 1943 An Approach to a Theory of Bureaucracy. American Sociological Review 8:47-54. SELZNICK, PHILIP 1949 TVA and the Grass Roots: A Study in the Sociology of Formal Organization. University of California Publications in Culture and Society, Vol. 3. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press. SELZNICK, PHILIP (1952) 1960 The Organizational Weapon: A Study of Bolshevik Strategy and Tactics. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. SIEDER, VIOLET 1960 The Citizen Volunteer in Historical Perspective. Pages 40-58 in Nathan E. Cohen (editor), The Citizen Volunteer. New York: Harper. Signposts in the Study of Voluntary Groups. 1965 Sociological Inquiry 35:135-240. -» The entire issue is devoted to papers on the study of voluntary associations. SILLS, DAVID L. 1957 The Volunteers: Means and Ends in a National Organization. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. SILLS, DAVID L. 1959 Voluntary Associations: Instruments and Objects of Change. Human Organization 18, no. 1:17-21. SIMON, HERBERT A. (1947) 1961 Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-making Processes in Ad-
VON MISES, LUDWIG ministrative Organization. 2d ed. New York: Macmillan. STARBUCK, WILLIAM 1965 Organizational Growth and Development. Pages 451-533 in James G. March (editor), Handbook of Organizations. Chicago: Rand McNally. TOCQUEVILLE, ALEXIS DE (1835) 1945 Democracy in America. 2 vols. New York: Knopf. -» First published in French. Paperback editions were published in 1961 by Vintage and by Schocken. TREUDLEY, MARY B. (1949a) 1966 The Transformation of Peasants Into Citizens. Pages 59-62 in William A. Glaser and David L. Sills (editors), The Government of Associations: Selections From the Behavioral Sciences. Totowa, N.J.: Bedminster. -> First published in Volume 14 of the American Sociological Review. TREUDLEY, MARY B. 1949b Formal Organization and the Americanization Process With Special Reference to the Greeks of Boston. American Sociological Review 14:44-53. TRUMAN, DAVID B. (1951) 1962 The Governmental Process: Political Interests and Public Opinion. New York: Knopf. TSOUDEROS, JOHN E. 1955 Organizational Change in Terms of a Series of Selected Variables. American Journal of Sociology 20:206-210. UDY, STANLEY H. JR. 1965 The Comparative Analysis of Organizations. Pages 678-709 in James G. March (editor), Handbook of Organizations. Chicago: Rand McNally. WALLERSTEIN, IMMANUEL 1964 Voluntary Associations. Pages 318-339 in James S. Coleman and Carl G. Rosberg, Jr. (editors), Political Parties and National Integration in Tropical Africa. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press. WARNER, W. LLOYD; and LUNT, PAUL S. 1941 The Social Life of a Modern Community. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. WEBER, MAX 1911 [Geschaftsbericht.] Deutscher Sociologentag, Verhandlungen 1:39-62. -> The translations of the extracts in the text were provided by Elinor G. Barber. WEICK, KARL E. 1965 Laboratory Experimentation With Organizations. Pages 194-260 in James G. March (editor), Handbook of Organizations. Chicago: Rand McNally. WILENSKY, HAROLD L. 1961 Life Cycle, Work Situation, and Participation in Formal Associations. Pages 213242 in Robert W. Kleemeier (editor), Aging and Leisure. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. WIRTH, Louis 1938 Urbanism as a Way of Life. American Journal of Sociology 44:1-24. WRIGHT, CHARLES R.; and HYMAN, HERBERT H. 1958 Voluntary Association Memberships of American Adults: Evidence From National Sample Surveys. American Sociological Review 23:284-294. ZALD, MAYER N.; and DENTON, PATRICIA 1963 From Evangelism to General Service: The Transformation of the Y.M.C.A. Administrative Science Quarterly 8: 214-234. ZELDITCH, MORRIS JR.; and HOPKINS, TERENCE K. 1961 Laboratory Experiments With Organizations. Pages 464-478 in Amitai Etzioni (editor), Complex Organizations: A Sociological Reader. New York: Holt. ZIMMER, BASIL G.; and HAWLEY, AMOS H. 1959 The Significance of Membership in Associations. American Journal of Sociology 65:196-201.
379
VON BORTKIEWICZ, LADISLAUS See BORTKIEWICZ, LADISLAUS VON. VON HELMHOLTZ, HERMANN See HELMHOLTZ, HERMANN VON. VON MISES, LUDWIG Ludwig von Mises, economist and social philosopher, was born in Lemberg, in the Austro— Hungarian empire, in 1881. More than any other economist of the twentieth century, von Mises has expounded and developed the theories of the Austrian school of economics. Von Mises was born into a professional family— his father was a construction engineer for the Austrian railroads. After attending a Gymnasium he entered the University of Vienna at the turn of the century, a time of unusual intellectual ferment. At the university he studied economics under Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk, the chief figure in the Austrian school, and under his colleague, Eugen von Philippovich. Among von Mises' friends and fellow students were the economist Joseph Schumpeter and the legal philosopher Hans Kelsen. His younger brother, Richard von Mises, became a prominent mathematician, aeronautical engineer, and leading member of the Vienna circle, the founders of the logical positivist movement in philosophy. Monetary theory. Von Mises' first interest was economic history, but he became increasingly aware of the failure of the Austrian school to integrate the theory of money into its marginal utility analysis. In The Theory of Money and Credit (1912), which established his reputation as an economist, von Mises accomplished this integration. In addition, by means of his regression theorem, he solved the marginal utility-price problem known as the "Austrian circle"; his theorem logically reduced the existence of money to its origin as a useful commodity in a world of barter, its value there being determined by its marginal utility in use. As a corollary, he demonstrated that a society's money can have its origin only in such a commodity. His book contains much else. He fully developed cashbalance analysis long before the Cambridge school of economists did so. Building on the insight of the Czech economist Cuhel, he showed that utility can be ranked only ordinally and cannot be measured, and his work on this subject considerably anticipated that of J. R. Hicks and R. G. D. Allen. Long before Gustav Cassel, von Mises set forth the purchasing-power-parity theory of exchange rates. He
380
VON MISES, LUDWIG
penetratingly criticized the concept of index numbers, the mechanical quantity theory of money and Fisher's equation of exchange, and the notion that stabilization of the price level is desirable. And finally, he defended the virtually forgotten merits of hard money, free banking, 100 per cent gold banking, and parallel gold and silver standards. Business cycle theory. In the monetary doctrines of the English classical economists and the currency school—more particularly, in their analysis of specie-flow, which they had relegated to the theory of international trade—von Mises found a cogent, although primitive, monetary theory of the business cycle. Building on this foundation, as well as on Wickseli's basic distinction between the "natural" rate and money rate of interest, von Mises presented the rudiments, in The Theory of Money and Credit, of his important monetary malinvestment theory of the business cycle. His was virtually the only business cycle theory to deduce an explanation of the cycle from a general analysis of the economy and the price system. He explained the boom as resulting from fiduciary bank credit expansion, which inflates the money supply, artificially lowers the rate of interest, and causes overinvestment in the higher stages of production. The depression inevitably follows upon the cessation of such credit expansion and constitutes the method by which the market returns the economy to the structure of production most desired by the consumers. In the 1920s, von Mises fully developed his cycle theory, elaborating it in his Geldwertstabilisierung und Konjunkturpolitik (1928) and applying it, in Die Ursachen der Wirtschaftskrise (1931), to the great depression which began at this time and which he had anticipated. His theory aroused widespread interest on the Continent and in England as an explanation of the unexpectedly severe depression. The policy conclusions he drew from the theory were especially thought-provoking: strict laissez-faire and reduction of government expenditure; hard money and abstention from any inflation; and freedom for market forces to complete their adjustments as quickly as possible, without artificial propping up of wage rates, stimulation of consumption, or preservation of unsound investments and firms. Von Mises had considerable influence between the time of the publication of The Theory of Money and Credit and the mid-1930s. He exercised this influence as a professor at the University of Vienna, as an advisor to the Austrian Chamber of Commerce, and as a founder, in 1926, of the Austrian
Institute for Business Cycle Research. Among the German and Austrian students and followers of von Mises were Fritz Machlup, Gottfried von Haberler, Wilhelm Ropke, Oskar Morgenstern, Richard Strigl, Siegfried Budge, and Georg Halm. Another of his followers, Friedrich von Hayek, took a post at the London School of Economics and thus contributed to the diffusion of von Mises' cycle theory in England; von Hayek extended the theory by integrating it further with the Bohm-Bawerkian analysis of production. In England, von Mises' ideas strongly influenced Lionel Robbins, Ludwig M. Lachmann, Frederic Benham, W. H. Hutt, and even such later disparate thinkers as Abba P. Lerner and Hicks. In the United States, C. A. Phillips applied the cycle theory to explain the depression of the 1930s. After the mid-1930s the theory was unfortunately buried in the avalanche of enthusiasm for Keynesian economics. Critique of socialism and interventionism. Another important contribution of von Mises was his demonstration—first in an article in 1920, "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth," then in his general critique of socialism, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (1922)— that a system of socialist planning cannot calculate economically, lacking as it does a true price system based on private ownership of producers' goods. It follows that socialism cannot successfully plan and operate a modern industrial economy. For two decades this issue was vigorously discussed, and most socialists conceded that von Mises had pointed out a crucial problem which they had overlooked. Oskar Lange and others insisted that they could demonstrate the possibility of a functioning price system under socialism; von Mises, however, had not only anticipated these "solutions" in his 1920 article but, later, in Human Action (1949), explicitly refuted them. Von Mises' insights and theories gradually converged into a consistent view of political economy. Thus, he believed that nothing is to be gained from various types of government intervention in the economy: monetary intervention leads to runaway inflation and the trade cycle; minimum wage rates above the marginal product of the laborer bring about mass unemployment; and price control creates incurable shortages. He summarized his views on the futility of intervention in a collection of essays entitled Kritik des Interventionism us (19231926). Having shown that socialism and interventionism are both unworkable, von Mises emerged as the most notable champion in the twentieth century of consistent, uncompromising laissez-
VON MISES, LUDWIG faire. In The Free and Prosperous Commonwealth (1927), he declared that laissez-faire liberalism appears to be the only viable economic system. Scientific methodology. During the 1920s, von Mises became very much interested in episternology. In opposition to the increasingly fashionable methodology of positivism, he set forth a methodology of purely logical deduction from selfevident and a priori axioms, based on the approach of Nassau Senior and of other classical and Austrian economists. He developed his methodological approach—which he was later to call "praxeology" —in a series of essays, Epistemological Problems of Economics (1933). Praxeology, with its stress on individual human action, on the individual's purposive choice of means to arrive at preferred ends, heavily influenced Robbins' methodological work, which English-speaking economists came to regard as outstanding. Von Mises also made a sharp distinction between economic theory and history, demonstrating that history, the complex resultant of many causal factors, cannot be used to test theory; history can do no more than provide data to be explained by theory. Here von Mises was building on the philosophy of history developed by such scholars of the southwest German school of philosophy as Heinrich Rickert, Wilhelm Windelband, and von Mises' friend Max Weber. Although most of economic thought, after the mid-1930s, was moving in a different direction, von Mises proceeded to develop the general system of economic theory that he had laid out in his 1933 book. The result was his N ationalokonomie: Theorie des Handelns und Wirtschaftens (1940), the first general treatise on economics since World War I; later it was expanded into the English-language work, Human Action (1949). In addition, the book resurrected Fetter's pure time-preference theory of interest and contained an incisive critique of the increasingly popular mathematical approach to economics, thus continuing the Austrian tradition of verbal and logical deduction. When the political situation in Austria became increasingly turbulent, von Mises left; he taught at the Graduate Institute of International Studies at Geneva from 1934 to 1940 and then emigrated to the United States, where he has made his home ever since. On grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Bureau of Economic Research, he wrote Bureaucracy (1944a) and Omnipotent Government (1944b). In the latter work he challenged the Marxist view that Nazism was a creature of capitalism, asserting instead that Na-
387
zism and fascism were simply variant forms of socialism. Since World War n, von Mises has taught at New York University, and his ideas have again become influential. He was one of the founding members of the Mont Pelerin Society, an international association of free-market economists and social philosophers; some of his colleagues—Rb'pke in Germany, Jacques Rueff in France, and Luigi Einaudi in Italy—contributed to the shift in emphasis in their countries from central planning to the free market. At about the same time, von Hayek's Road to Serfdom helped inaugurate an economic liberal revival in the United States. Von Mises himself has continued his prodigious output, elaborating his distinction between history and theory (1957) and his critique of positivism (1962). MURRAY N. ROTHBARD [For the historical context of von Mises' work, see ECONOMIC THOUGHT, article on THE AUSTRIAN SCHOOL; and the biographies of BOHM-BAWERK; SENIOR; WICKSELL. Also related are the articles INTEREST; MONEY; UTILITY.] WORKS BY VON MISES (1912) 1953 The Theory of Money and Credit. New ed., enl. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. -> First published as Theorie des Geldes und der Umlaufsmittel. 1919 Nation, Staat und Wirtschaft: Beitrdge zur Politik und Geschichte der Zeit. Vienna: Manzsche Verlag. (1920) 1966 Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth. Pages 87-103 in Friedrich A. von Hayek (editor), Collective Economic Planning: Critical Studies on the Possibilities of Socialism. New York: Kelley. -> First published in Volume 47 of the Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaften. (1922) 1959 Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis. New ed., enl. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. -> First published as Die Gemeinwirtschaft. (1923-1926) 1929 Kritik des Interventionismus: Untersuchungen zur Wirtschaftspolitik und Wirtschaftsideologie der Gegenwart. Jena: Fischer. -> A collection of five articles. (1927) 1962 The Free and Prosperous Commonwealth: An Exposition of the Ideas of Classical Liberalism. Edited by Arthur Goddard. Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand. H> First published as Liberalismus. 1928 Geldwertstabilisierung und Konjunkturpolitik. Jena: Fischer. 1931 Die Ursachen der Wirtschaftskrise: Ein Vortrag. Tubingen: Mohr. (1933) 1960 Epistemological Problems of Economics. Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand. -> First published as Grundprobleme der N ationalokonomie. 1940 N ationalokonomie: Theorie des Handelns und Wirtschaftens. Geneva: Editions Union. 1944a Bureaucracy. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. -» A paperback edition was published in 1962. 1944Z? Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press.
382
VON MISES, RICHARD
University. In 1906, immediately after finishing these studies, he became an assistant to Georg Hamel, who had just accepted a professorship of mechanics at the Technical University in Briinn (now Brno). In 1908 von Mises was awarded a doctorate by the Technical University in Vienna SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY and in the same year obtained the venia legendi ANDERSON, BENJAMIN M. JR. (1917) 1936 The Value (Privatdozentur} at Briinn, with an inaugural disof Money. New York: Smith. -> Includes a sympasertation entitled Theorie der Wasserrader (1908). thetic treatment of von Mises' theory of money. CHAMBERS, RAYMOND J. 1966 Accounting, Evaluation, But after only one year (at the age of 26), he was and Economic Behavior. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: called to Strasbourg as associate professor of apPrentice-Hall. plied mathematics, the field he made famous. ELLIS, HOWARD S. 1934 German Monetary Theory, After five happy and fruitful years in Strasbourg, 1905-1933. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. -> Includes an extensive treatment of von Mises' thevon Mises joined the newly formed Flying Corps of ories of money and business cycles. the Austro-Hungarian Army at the outbreak of KAUDER, EMIL 1965 The History of Marginal Utility World War I (he already had a pilot's license). He Theory. Princeton Univ. Press. was soon recalled from service in the field to act KIRZNER, ISRAEL M. 1960 The Economic Point of View: An Essay in the History of Economic Thought. Princeas technical adviser, organizer, and instructor. In ton, N.J.: Van Nostrand. -» The history of the change the Fliegerarsenal in Aspern, he taught the theory in the view of the nature and the scope of economics of flight to German and Austrian officers; these from the classicists to von Mises. lectures constituted the first version of his Fluglehre ROTHBARD, MURRAY N. 1962 Man, Economy, and State: A Treatise on Economic Principles. 2 vols. Princeton, (1918), which went through many editions. He N.J.: Van Nostrand. -> A general treatise on economwas commissioned to design the first large airplane ics and political economy, building on von Mises' of the empire, the "Grossflugzeug." At the same Human Action (1949). time he was working on two basic papers on probSELIGMAN, BEN B. 1962 Main Currents in Modern Economics: Economic Thought Since 1870. New York: ability (discussed below). Free Press. -» Contains a chapter on von Mises from When the war was over, von Mises could not the point of view of institutional economics. return to Strasbourg, which had become French. SENNHOLZ, MARY H. (editor) 1956 On Freedom and After a brief interlude as lecturer in Frankfurt, he Free Enterprise: Essays in Honor of Ludwig von was called in 1919 to the Technical University in Mises. Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand. -> Contains essays about von Mises and his work. Dresden as professor, and in 1920 to the University of Berlin as professor of applied mathematics and director of the Institute of Applied Mathematics. This institute was actually founded by him and VON MISES, RICHARD was a precursor of several similar institutes in Richard von Mises (1883-1953), who contribEurope and America. In 1921 he founded the uted notably to the field of applied mathematics, Zeitschrift fur angewandte Mathematik und Mewas born in Lemberg, in the Austro-Hungarian chanik, the first journal of its kind. As its editor Empire. His father, Arthur von Mises, held a docuntil 1933, he exerted a profound influence on toral degree from the Institute of Technology in applied mathematics all over the world. For von Zurich and was a prominent railroad engineer in Mises, applied mathematics included mechanics, the civil service. On his travels all over the empire practical analysis, probability and statistics, and he was often accompanied by his family, and von some aspects of geometry and philosophy of sciMises was born on one of these journeys. The ence. He educated a generation of young applied family home was in Vienna. Von Mises was the mathematicians. His first assistant was Hilda Geirsecond of three brothers; the eldest, Ludwig, is an inger, who held a PH.D. in "pure" mathematics but economist of international reputation; the youngest turned, under his influence, to applied mathedied while still a boy. His father's family included matics. She became his collaborator and later his engineers, physicians, bankers, and civil servants. wife. Among the members of his mother's family were When, in 1933, von Mises recognized that it philologists and bibliophiles. would be both unwise and undignified to remain Von Mises attended the Akademische Gymnasium in Berlin, he accepted the position of professor of in Vienna and graduated in 1901 with high dis- mathematics and director of the mathematical intinction in Latin and mathematics. He then studied stitute in Istanbul, Turkey, at the university that mechanical engineering at the Vienna Technical had been revitalized by Kemal Atatiirk. He reorgan(1949) 1966 Human Action: A Treatise on Economics. 3d rev. ed. Chicago: Regnery. 1957 Theory and History: An Interpretation of Social and Economic Evolution. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. 1962 The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science: An Essay on Method. Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand.
VON MISES, RICHARD ized the institute, lectured in French and in Turkish, maintained close relations with Turkish professors and dignitaries, and became a leading figure at the university. But in 1939, with the approach of World War n, he felt he had to leave Istanbul; and he accepted a position as lecturer in the School of Engineering at Harvard University. There, he was appointed, in rapid succession, associate professor and Gordon McKay professor of aerodynamics and applied mathematics. He continued his own scientific work as well as the education of undergraduates, postgraduates, and research workers. The fields to which von Mises made distinctive contributions are (1) mechanics and geometry, (2) probability and statistics, (3) philosophy of science, and (4) analysis. Of these, the first two categories occupied him the most. Geometry captivated him all his life, and most of his geometric contributions are closely connected with mechanics. The outstanding feature of his work is a striving for clarity and complete understanding. In his contributions to mechanics no vague statements, no ad hoc engineering theories are tolerated; explanations of observations follow strictly from the principles of mechanics. Particularly important achievements are his Theorie der Wasserrdder (1908); his wing theory (1917-1920), which is based on conformal mapping; and his celebrated work on plasticity (1913; 1925; 1928a; 1949). The main directions of von Mises' thought on the theory of probability appeared in his first major papers on the subject, the "Fundamentalsatze der Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung" and the "Grundlagen der Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung," both of 1919. Von Mises considered probability as a science of the same epistemological type as, say, mechanics. Its mathematical construction is distilled from experience. The main concept, introduced in the "Grundlagen," is the Kollektiv (also denoted as "irregular collective"), which, in the simplest case, idealizes the sequence of results of the repeated tossings of a coin under unaltered circumstances. The collective as a mathematical notion is thus an infinite sequence of zeros and ones (heads and tails). If among the first N terms of the sequence there are N0 zeros and N x ones, N0 + N\ = N, the frequencies N0/N, NJN are given. For reasons of mathematical expediency it is then assumed that, in the abstract sequence, the limits of these frequencies exist as N tends toward infinity. In addition, the infinite sequence is to have the property of randomness; vaguely explained, this means the following: if we consider not all N trials (not all N terms of the sequence) but only the second, fourth, sixth, . . . or only those whose number is a
383
prime number or only those which follow a run of three "ones," we obtain by such a selection a frequency N[/N' (and N'0/N'), and it is postulated that for any such selection lim N;/N' = lim N/N = p,. ff-»oo
JV^-oo
This y>! is the probability of the result one, and pQ = 1 — Pi is that of the result zero. Randomness is the mathematical equivalent of the "impossibility of a gambling system" and thus characterizes the sequences which form the subject of probability calculus. Von Mises then built up probability theory, by means of collectives, in one or more dimensions. In 1938 Abraham Wald proved the "consistency"— i.e., existence in the mathematical sense—of the collective, indicating precise conditions. Von Mises accepted Wald's results as a necessary and valuable complement. He felt that in mathematics, as well as in any other science, the unceasing improvement and refinement of existing concepts must parallel the creation and extension of new concepts. Von Mises' theory is in contrast with the a prioristic theory of Laplace, whose definition of probability is both logically unsatisfactory and too narrow. Laplace and his followers therefore had to distinguish between a "theoretical" and an "empirical" probability; the mathematical theorems proved with the theoretical definitions were then unhesitatingly applied to problems where Laplace's "equally likely" and "favorable" events often failed to exist. Von Mises showed in a penetrating analysis that for modern probability, as used in physics, biology, and some of the social sciences, Laplace's definition is quite insufficient. Von Mises' frequency theory also differs from today's abstract measure-theoretical approach, most closely associated with Kolmogorov. The contrast is not between "frequency" and "measure": in von Mises' developments, as well as in Kolmogorov's, both frequencies and measures are essential. Von Mises wanted to lay the conceptual foundations of the science of probability; Kolmogorov, the axiomatic foundations of the calculus of probability. [See PROBABILITY.] The "Fundamentalsatze" deals with two basic general problems. (1) Given n distributions (for example, n dice with given probabilities p(f\ i = 1,2, • • • , 6; v = 1,2, • • • , n for the six faces of the dice), with results Xv in the fth trial, what is the distribution, as n -> «>, of the sum X, + Xo + • • • + Xn (equivalently, of the average) of these results? Regarding this group of problems, indicated here by a very special case, von Mises proved in 1919 two basic "local" theorems and studied the most
384
VON MISES, RICHARD
general problem. (2) Perhaps an even more important contribution is his formulation and study of the second fundamental problem. Consider again a very special case. A coin with unknown headsprobability is thrown n times, and "heads" turn up TC! times. What inference can we make from this observed result about the unknown heads-probability of the coin? Obviously, this is the typical problem of inference from an observed sample to an unknown "theoretical" value. This problem was considered by von Mises as the crucial problem of theoretical statistics. This "Bayesian" point of view has been widely attacked by R. A. Fisher and his students but seems to be more and more accepted today. For von Mises, statistics was just one (very important and general) application of probability theory. In the last years of his life von Mises introduced the fundamental concept of a statistical function (as important as the concepts earlier introduced by him of distribution and of sample space), which led to vast generalizations of the two problems of the "Fundamentalsatze." Von Mises' work in probability and statistics is incorporated in many papers and in three books: his Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung of 1931 (Volume 1 of Vorlesungen aus dem Gebiete der angewandten Mathematik), a comprehensive textbook of his theory; his Probability, Statistics and Truth (1928£>), a lucid presentation in nontechnical language of his foundations of probability and their applications in statistics, biology, and physics; and his lecture notes, Mathematical Theory of Probability and Statistics (1964), which restates and extends the foundations of the theory and builds on them a unified theory of probability and statistics, with particularly original contributions to statistics. Von Mises did not believe that statistical explanations in physics—and other domains of knowledge—are of transient utility while deterministic theories are the definite goal. He thought that a judgment of what constitutes an "explanation" is, like anything else, subject to change and development. The "Laplacean daimon" of complete determinacy is no longer accepted, nor is an immutable law of causality. Philosophers, von Mises thought, are apt to try to "eternalize" the current state of scientific affairs, just as Kant held Euclidean space as an absolute category. In contrast with these "school philosophers," he called himself a "positivist." In an address given shortly before his death he said, "He is a positivist who, when confronted by any problem reacts in the manner in which a typical contemporary scientist deals with his problems of research." Von Mises thought of science in
the general sense of the German Wissenschaft. In his book Positivism (1939) he followed up this conception through the various domains of thought and of life. Von Mises loved poetry.- He could recite long passages from Goethe, as well as from such modern poets as Hofmannsthal, Verlaine, Altenberg, and, in particular, Rilke. In Rilke's esoteric poetry he found a confirmation of his belief that in areas of life not yet explored by science, poetry expresses the experiences of the mind: Nicht sind die Leiden erkannt, nicht 1st die Liebe gelernt, und was im Tod uns entfernt, 1st nicht entschleiert. Einzig das Lied iiberm Land heiligt und feiert. Pain we misunderstand. love we have yet to learn, and death, from which we turn, awaits unveiling. Song alone circles the land hallowing and hailing. Sonnets to Orpheus, First Part, xix. Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1923. London: Hogarth, 1936.
Von Mises was a recognized authority on the life and work of Rilke. Over a lifetime, he compiled the largest privately owned Rilke collection (now at Harvard's Hough ton Library), for which a 400page catalogue was published in 1966 by the Insel Verlag, Leipzig. HILDA GEIRINGEE [For the historical context of von Mises' work, see the biography of LAPLACE; for discussion of the subsequent development of von Mises' ideas, see the biographies of FISHER, R. A.; WALD.] WORKS BY VON MISES
1908 Theorie der Wasserrcider. Leipzig: Teubner. -> Reprinted from Volume 57 of the Zeitschrift fur Mathematik und Physik. Partially reprinted in Volume 1 of von Mises' Selected Papers. 1913 Mechanik der festen Korper im plastisch-deformablen Zustand. Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, Gottingen, Mathematisch-Physikalische Klasse Nachrichten [1913]: 582-592. 1917-1920 Zur Theorie des Tragflachenauftriebs. Zeitschrift fur Flugtechnik und Motorluftschiffahrt 8:157163; 11:68-73, 87-89. (1918) 1957 Fluglehre: Theorie und Eerechnung der Flugzeuge in elementarer Darstellung. 6th ed. Edited by Kurt Hohenemser. Berlin: Springer. 1919a Fundamentalsatze der Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung. Mathematische Zeitschrift 4:1-97. 1919& Grundlagen der Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung. Mathematische Zeitschrift 5:52-100.
VON NEUMANN, JOHN 1925
Bemerkungen zur Formulierung des mathematischen Problems der Plastizitatstheorie. Zeitschrift fur angewandte Mathematik und Mechanik 5:147—149. 1928a Mechanik der plastischen Formanderung von Kristallen. Zeitschrift fur angewandte Mathematik und Mechanik 8:161-185. (1928k) 1957 Probability, Statistics and Truth. 2d rev. English edition. New York: Macmillan. -> First published in German. This edition was edited by Hilda Geiringer. (1931) 1945 Vorlesungen aus dem Gebiete der angewandten Mathematik. Volume 1: Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung und ihre Anwendung in der Statistik und theoretischen Physik. New York: Rosenberg. (1939) 1951 Positivism: A Study in Human Understanding. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. -» First published as Kleines Lehrbuch des Positivismus. 1949 Three Remarks on the Theory of the Ideal Plastic Body. Pages 415-429 in Reissner Anniversary Volume: Contributions to Applied Mechanics. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Edwards. Mathematical Theory of Probability and Statistics. Edited by Hilda Geiringer. New York: Academic Press, 1964. -» Based upon lectures given in 1946. Selected Papers of Richard von Mises. 2 vols. Providence, R.I.: American Mathematical Society, 1963-1964. -> Contains von Mises' writings first published between 1908 and 1954. Volume 1: Geometry, Mechanics, Analysis. Volume 2: Probability and Statistics; General. Includes a bibliography on pages 555-568 in Volume 2. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
CRAMER, HARALD 1953 Richard von Mises' Work in Probability and Statistics. Annals of Mathematical Statistics 24:657-662. -> Includes a selected bibliography of von Mises' work. WALD, ABRAHAM (1938)1955 Die Widerspruchsfreiheit des Kollektivbegriffes. Pages 25-45 in Abraham Wald, Selected Papers in Statistics and Probability. New York: McGraw-Hill.
VON NEUMANN, JOHN John von Neumann, mathematician, was born in Budapest in 1903 and died in Washington, D.C., in 1957. He was the first of the great creative mathematicians to devote major effort to the social sciences. After studying in Budapest and Zurich, von Neumann became a Privatdozent in Berlin; in 1931 he received an appointment at Princeton University, and in 1933 he joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he remained for the rest of his life. In 1955, on leave from the institute, he was made a member of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. For his scientific work and public services he received several honorary doctorates, academy memberships, prizes, medals, and other distinctions. Von Neumann's genius ranged over many areas of pure mathematics as well as applied fields. He made important contributions to the axiomatics of
385
set theory, mathematical logic, Hilbert space theory, operator theory, group theory, and measure theory. He proved the ergodic theorem, established a continuous geometry without points, introduced almostperiodic functions on groups, and at the end of his life was much concerned with nonlinear differential equations. In addition, he had a consuming interest in numerical applications, ranging from the development of new computing techniques to the study of the mathematical validity of large-scale numerical operations as they are carried out by modern electronic computers. Von Neumann's work in physics was manifold. In his Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (1932), a study of enduring significance, he laid a firm basis for this new field by the first comprehensive use and development of Hilbert space. In his study "The Logic of Quantum Mechanics" (see von Neumann & Birkhoff 1936) he revealed the inner logical structure of quantum mechanics and suggested that each science has its own specific logic. Von Neumann's influence was felt in hydrodynamics, mechanics of continua, astrophysics, and meteorology. In statistics he made contributions to trend analysis, and he developed the Monte Carlo method. He established the logical basis for electronic computer design and built the first of the truly modern flexible machines. He was also concerned with the development of a logical theory of automata and proved the possibility of a self-reproducing machine. This work (1966) is closely related to his "Probabilistic Logics" (1956). Von Neumann's work had great importance for the social sciences. For example, he opened up entirely new avenues in mathematical economics. In 1928 he published a fundamental paper on the theory of games of strategy in which the now famous minimax theorem was proved for the first time. This theorem establishes that, in a two-person zero-sum game with finite numbers of strategies, there always exist optimal strategies for each player. Each player is assumed to choose a strategy independently, and in ignorance, of his opponent's choice. Selection of an optimal strategy is shown to involve the selection of proper probabilities of adopting each of the pure strategies available. [See GAME THEORY.] This work was developed further in Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (von Neumann & Morgenstern 1944). The theory was extended to n-persons ( n ^ 3 ) and to cases where the sum of winnings by all players is a constant different from zero or is variable. The Theory of Games also developed a theory of individual choice in situations of risk, which has given rise to an extensive liter-
386
VON NEUMANN, JOHN
ature on utility. Game theory, besides analyzing games proper, is taken as a model for economic and social phenomena; it applies to all situations where the participants do not control or know the probability distributions of all variables on which the outcome of their acts depends, situations that therefore cannot be described as ordinary maximum or minimum problems (even allowing for side conditions). Since the publication of the Theory of Games, hundreds of books and papers by many authors in many countries have furthered and applied the theory. In 1937 von Neumann wrote on the general equilibrium of a uniformly expanding closed economy under conditions of constant returns to scale in production and unlimited supply of natural resources. Employing the minimax theory, he proved that the economy's expansion factor must equal the interest factor. The linear production relations in the model include linear inequalities and take full account of alternative processes and of indirect production among industries. In these respects, the model is the forerunner of linear programming and activity analysis, both of which are related to game theory by virtue of the minimax theorem. This work, together with that of Abraham Wald, marked the beginning of a new period in mathematical economics. [See ECONOMIC EQUILIBRIUM.] Von Neumann showed that the representation of an economic system requires a set of inequalities since, for example, for any good, both the amount produced and the price must necessarily be nonnegative. A solution of the system must satisfy the inequality constraints, and the existence of a solution is not ensured merely by the equality of the number of unknowns and the number of equations. A fundamental element in von Neumann's mathematical work is the close relation of his thought to the physical and social sciences. He was firmly convinced that the greatest stimulus for mathematics has always come from the mathematician's involvement with empirically given problems; the simultaneous development of calculus and mechanics is the most striking example. He also believed that the mathematical treatment of the social sciences must be quite different from that of the physical sciences. His profound involvement with the social sciences and his very good knowledge of the natural sciences give special weight to his judgment that these two types of science have different mathematical structures. He expected the mathematical study of social phenomena to bring about the development of new mathematical techniques. He took the largely combinatorial approach of game
theory as an indication that the time when this would happen might still be remote. While von Neumann was primarily interested in the mathematical problems of the physical sciences, he nevertheless had a profound concern for the social sciences, which he considered to be in a state comparable to that of physics prior to Newton. This concern expressed itself also in his interest in history and politics, two fields in which he read widely. He had great influence on his contemporaries not only through the large amount of his published work but also through his many contacts with scientists all over the world. OSKAR MORGENSTERN
[See also GAME THEORY; PROGRAMMING.] WORKS BY VON NEUMANN
(1928) 1959 On the Theory of Games of Strategy. Volume 4, pages 13-42 in A. W. Tucker and R. Duncan Luce (editors), Contributions to the Theory of Games. Princeton Univ. Press. -» First published in German. (1932) 1955 Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics. Investigations in Physics, No. 2. Princeton Univ. Press. -> First published in German. (1936) 1962 VON NEUMANN, JOHN; and BIRKHOFF, GARRETT The Logic of Quantum Mechanics. Volume 4, pages 105-125 in John von Neumann, Collected Works. Edited by A. H. Taub. New York: Pergamon. 1937 Uber ein 6konomisch.es Gleichungssystem und eine Verallgemeinerung des Brouwerschen Fixpunktsatzes. Ergebnisse eines mathematischen Kolloquiums 8:7383. (1944) 1964 VON NEUMANN, JOHN; and MORGENSTERN, OSKAR Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. 3d ed. New York: Wiley. 1950 Functional Operators. 2 vols. Annals of Mathematical Studies, Nos. 21-22. Princeton Univ. Press. (1956) 1963 Probabilistic Logics and the Synthesis of Reliable Organisms From Unreliable Components. Volume 5, pages 329-378 in John von Neumann, Collected Works. Edited by A. H. Taub. New York: Pergamon. (1958) 1959 The Computer and the Brain. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. -» Published posthumously. 1960 Continuous Geometry. Princeton Mathematical Series, No. 25. Princeton Univ. Press. -> Published posthumously. 1966 Theory of Self-reproducing Automata. Edited and completed by A. W. Burks. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press. -> Published posthumously. Collected Works. Edited by A. H. Taub. 6 vols. New York: Pergamon, 1961-1963. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
BEHNKE, HEINRICH; and HERMES, HANS 1957 Johann von Neumann: Ein grosses Mathematikerleben unserer Zeit. Mathematisch-physikalische Semesterberichte 5: 186-190. BOCHNER, S. 1958 John von Neumann, December 28, 1903-February 8, 1957. Volume 32, pages 438-457 in National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C.,
VOTING Biographical Memoirs. Washington: The Academy. -* Includes a ten-page bibliography. John von Neumann, 1903-1957. 1958 American Mathematical Society, Bulletin 64, no. 3, part 2. KUHN, H. W.; and TUCKER, A. W. 1958 John von Neumann's Work in the Theory of Games and Mathematical Economics. American Mathematical Society, Bulletin 64, no. 3, part 2:100-122. MORGENSTERN, OSKAR 1958 Obituary: John von Neumann, 1903-1957. Economic Journal 68:170-174. ULAM, S. 1958 John von Neumann, 1903-1957. American Mathematical Society, Bulletin 64, no. 3, part 2: 1-49. -> See especially the bibliography on pages 4248. See also pages 48-49, "Abstracts of Papers Presented to the American Mathematical Society."
VON SAVIGNY, FRIEDRICH CARL See SAVIGNY, FRIEDRICH CARL VON. VON STEIN, LORENZ See STEIN, LORENZ VON.
VON THUNEN, JOHANN HEINRICH See THUNEN, JOHANN HEINRICH VON. VON WIESE, LEOPOLD See WIESE, LEOPOLD VON. VON WIESER, FRIEDRICH See WIESER, FRIEDRICH VON.
VOTING Voting is a means of aggregating individual preferences into collective decisions. It is not the sole means: market mechanisms frequently perform a similar function, as do processes of informal interaction in many social and political groups. The aggregation of individual preferences by voting raises a variety of issues (How many alternatives are voted upon? Is a complete or a partial preference ordering required of the individual elector? What rule shall determine the collective outcome?) which properly belong to the study of elections [see ELECTIONS]. The study of electoral behavior may be viewed as concerned more narrowly with the formation and expression of individual preferences. The diffusion of voting gives the study of electoral behavior an exceedingly broad empirical terrain. However, electoral studies have, in fact, mainly treated the behavior of large-scale electorates in the national states of North America and Europe. By the end of the nineteenth century the spread of liberal democracy in these nations had given the public the power to intervene in govern-
387
ment through the choice of elective officeholders. Since the voting of mass electorates was a significant element of the politics of these nations, it was inevitable that it should attract the attention of later empirical studies, and the systematic study of voting has now extended to a number of Western and non-Western nations. Methods of electoral analysis In any large electoral system, the aggregation of individual preferences through voting involves extensive record keeping, and the immense wealth of data issuing from the conduct of elections has been a primary resource of the study of voting. Indeed, many of the earliest systematic studies relied entirely on data of this kind (Siegfried 1913). Increasingly strict traditions of secrecy surrounding the ballot have prevented direct access to records of the preferences of individual voters (though not always to records of individual participation), limiting the investigator, in almost every case, to preference data aggregated by electoral units such as precincts or communes. As a result, legal or administrative regulations affecting these data have had wide impact on research. Since the time of Andre Siegfried, French electoral studies have been able to use data for communes, whereas British electoral research (psephology) has been obliged to work with the larger, parliamentary constituencies, since the Ballot Act of 1872 requires that all ballot papers for a constituency be brought together and physically shuffled prior to counting. The German Federal Republic offers a limited exception to the unavailability of individual-level data on party preference: the ballots cast in a sample of Wahlbezirke, "electoral districts," are tallied within demographic categories jointly defined by sex and age, and the distributions of party preference within these categories are then published by the Kohlhammer Verlag. The returns for a given election in a given electoral unit furnish two kinds of information: (1) the total of ballots will measure the level of participation or turnout, if the size of the electorate is known and if the turnout is not obscured by some form of multiple voting, and (2 ) the totals of votes for particular parties or candidates will measure the distribution of preference. The analytic use to which these two kinds of information are put has varied according to whether the investigator examines a single election only or change between two or more elections. Single-election analyses typically have considered the tendency of the vote to vary with other known characteristics of the electoral
388
VOTING
units involved. Thus, Ogburn and Talbot (1929) compared the proportions of votes cast for Alfred E. Smith in each of a sample of counties in the 1928 U.S. presidential election with the proportions of electors within each county who were Roman Catholic, foreign-born, urban, traditionally Democratic, and favorable to the repeal of prohibition. They found that the presidential vote varied less by religion than by attitude toward prohibition. Similarly, Allardt (1964) examined support for the Communist party in postwar Finnish elections across a set of electoral units, which he classified in social and economic terms, and demonstrated that the communists did better in poor and wealthy communes than in communes of intermediate wealth. Where candidates for several offices are voted for, analyses of single elections may exploit differences of turnout or party preference between offices. Thus, Silva (1962) has questioned Al Smith's responsibility for the debacle of 1928, by contrasting the Democratic presidential vote with the party vote for other offices in that year. Longitudinal studies of election returns may also classify electoral units by various social characteristics, but the introduction of change permits significant analysis with little or no additional information. Thus, the Nuffield studies have used the uniformity of intersection "swing" in Britain's parliamentary constituencies to argue the dominance of national influences on change (Butler & Rose 1960) and have used the variations of swing by pattern of candidature to decide whether the intervention of a Liberal candidate was more damaging to the Labour or Conservative party (Butler & King 1965). Returns from five Congressional elections for districts which are "nested" within states and within the nation as a whole have been used to measure the relative influence of national, state, and constituency factors on changes of the Congressional vote (Stokes 1965). Two main difficulties have stood in the way of studies of election returns. One of these—applying especially to static single-election analyses—is the problem of inferring the relationship between social characteristics and the voting behavior of individual electors from data on the relationship of social composition and voting behavior in aggregate units. Early investigators were aware of the hazards of making such inferences, but it remained for Robinson (1950) to demonstrate how real the dangers of the fallacy of ecological correlation are. Robinson, indeed, demonstrated that the direction of a correlation at the aggregate and individual levels might be reversed: the Democrats might, for example, poll a larger share of the vote in Protestant
than in Catholic counties, even though they actually enjoyed wider support among Catholics than among Protestants, in the electorate as a whole. His work has stimulated the development of alternative modes of analysis (Goodman 1959; Duncan et al. 1961), which have application to dynamic analyses as well (Vangrevelinge 1961; Telser 1963). An even greater difficulty in the way of studies of election returns is the exceeding sparseness of information about the composition of electoral units. At most a very few facts can be gleaned from census and other sources about the social and economic character of the electoral units whose turnout and preferences are to be analyzed. To penetrate the processes which relate these facts to electoral behavior, the investigator would need a great deal of information which is not gathered by any governmental agency. So long as measurement remains at the level of gross social and political indicators, many ambiguities will surround the motives and attitudes of the groupings whose behavior is described by the ecological method. These difficulties supplied much of the impetus of the early survey studies of electoral behavior. Since the interview survey afforded direct access to individuals, the relationship of social characteristics to individual behavior could be a matter of direct measurement, rather than of inference. Similarly, repeated surveys of the same individuals could disclose the full pattern of electoral change over time. Most important, however, the interview survey could elicit from the individual elector— and, hence, from representative samples of the whole electorate—a much richer collection of information. In this fact, more than any other, lay the true significance of the advent of electoral surveys. Merriam and Gosnell (1924) surveyed electors in the early 1920s, and by the middle 1930s several commercial opinion-polling organizations were engaged in sample surveys. But the true potential of such studies was first clearly displayed by the Erie County (Ohio) project of Lazarsfeld and his associates (Lazarsfeld et al. 1944), which was also the first "panel" study involving repeated interviews of the same electors. This and a companion study (Berelson et al. 1954) have inspired local electoral surveys in other countries (Degras et al. 1956) and were of great influence in the later nationwide studies by the University of Michigan Survey Research Center group (Campbell et al. 1954; Michigan. . . 1960). Interview surveys require scarcely a fraction of the resources expended in the administration of elections. But the expense of such studies is great
VOTING enough to limit severely their scope and number. In some cases governments themselves have supported survey studies of voting behavior: both the Swedish and Norwegian governments have extended such support. But official election returns continue to be a prime resource of electoral research, especially studies of local or regional variations and studies of historical elections antedating the rise of survey methods. Indeed, voting returns and survey data have been combined with increasing frequency (Miller 1956; Outright & Rossi 1958). Hypotheses suggested by survey studies are frequently tested by analyses of election returns (Burnham 1965; Sellers 1965; Stokes & Iversen 1962). Recent computer models of electoral behavior have drawn in an eclectic fashion upon the data and findings of survey studies and analyses of election returns (McPhee 1963; Pool et al. 1964). The range of electoral studies The several traditions of method have been paralleled by broad differences in the focus of electoral studies. Since aggregate election units could be characterized most easily in terms of social composition, studies of official returns for single elections most often have treated the voting patterns of different ethnic, racial, religious, class, and other groupings. Studies of this kind have not lacked hypotheses about psychological factors which might intervene between social characteristics and political behavior, but these factors have typically been inferred rather than measured directly. Thus, Lipset and his coauthors (Lipset et al. 1954) reviewed evidence of higher participation and of "left" voting among certain sociologically defined groups in Western nations, offering explanatory hypotheses which were based on inferences from what was known of these groups. Longitudinal studies of election returns have been less exclusively sociological in character. Since there typically is more variation of voting behavior than of social structure, short-run political variations are difficult to explain in terms of social-structural factors. Key and Munger (1959) have argued this point and the complementary point that the conserving role of party loyalties can preserve the political tradition of local areas over long periods of time despite gross changes of social structure and economic activity. Although the interview survey eventually permitted electoral research to deal with very different factors, the early survey studies reinforced the sociological tradition. The reasons were partly methodological. The first sample survey selected respondents by asking interviewers to fill a set of
389
sociological "quotas," obtaining sample proportions of the middle and working classes, Negroes and whites, males and females, and the young and the old that were equal to the known proportions of these groupings within the population. Having classified their respondents in this fashion, investigators tended naturally to report the turnout and distribution of party support within these same categories. As this type of information began to issue from the commercial polls in the 1930s and 1940s, it dispelled many of the uncertainties which had surrounded sociological inferences from the election returns. The sociological tradition was elaborated and reinforced by Lazarsfeld's Erie County study (Lazarsfeld et al. 1944), which developed the Index of Political Predisposition to summarize the relationship of party preference to several social-structural factors and which gave the literature of voting research the aphorism "a person thinks, politically, as he is, socially." The work of Lazarsfeld and his associates showed the potential of the survey method for the exploration of very different kinds of factors. Indeed, the second of their community studies (Berelson et al. 1954) gave more sustained attention to psychological processes, discussing inter alia the way in which the partisan voter tends to misperceive the policy attitudes of his party's candidate in order to make them consistent with his own. Psychological factors have been much more prominent in the work of the Michigan Survey Research Center, which has been influenced by the field-theoretic approaches of Lewin and others. The center's first major electoral study (Campbell et al. 1954) conceived party identification, issue orientation, and candidate orientation as three factors in a field of psychological forces immediately influencing electoral behavior. A later report of the center's work (Michigan . . . 1960) dealt more inclusively with the influence of psychological forces on behavior and treated at length the causal dependence of these forces on antecedent social, economic, cultural, and other factors. The British community studies conducted by Milne and MacKenzie (1954; 1958) also gave close attention to the party "images" formed by electors, although these studies are less clear on the relation of such perceptual factors to the voters' behavior. Contemporary electoral studies have combined an interest in the beliefs, attitudes, perceptions, and motives of the individual elector with an interest in the functioning of the broad public within the political system. This tendency has been both the cause and a consequence of the rise of comparative research. Thus, Almond and Verba (1963) examined orientations toward the political system
390
VOTING
in the publics of five nations, identifying differences in the "political cultures" of these countries which were thought to explain certain differences in their politics. The attention given the place of electorates in a larger political order has created areas common to the study of electoral behavior and studies of political parties and party systems (Converse & Dupeux 1962; Valen & Katz 1964), extremist political movements (Lipset 1960), political representation (Miller & Stokes 1963). Major problem areas Electoral behavior has attracted the interest of an extraordinary range of disciplines, as social and clinical psychologists, sociologists, psychiatrists, and economists, as well as political scientists, have added to the body of empirical knowledge. It is quite impossible to survey the field thoroughly in a few pages. Several available book-length works (Hyman 1959; Lane 1959a; Lane & Sears 1964; Lipset et al. 1954; Milbrath 1965) integrate findings from a number of studies; indeed, one summary of findings from a limited group of studies lists several hundred empirically based generalizations (Berelson et al. 1954). In this enormous accumulation of findings, it is possible, however, to identify several problems which have attracted the widest attention. Participation. There has, first of all, been sustained interest in the sources of the broad public's participation or lack of participation in politics. This problem is not easily disentangled from the ideology of liberal democracy, in which the citizen's participation in periodic elections is a basic norm. The tendency of actual participation to fall short of this norm is part of what has attracted attention to the "problem" of participation. But in view of the colossal dimensions of modern electorates and the tenuous links between electoral behavior and government action, an equally interesting problem is to identify the reasons why the citizen participates at all. [See POLITICAL PARTICIPATION.] It is possible to categorize factors in participation as normative, instrumental, and expressive. By normative is understood a response to the value, usually positive, which the elector perceives the act itself to have. There can be little question that very broad parts of the mass public respond to the norms of "citizen duty," which are so much a part of the ethos of liberal democracy (Michigan . . . 1960) and which are heavily reinforced by the propaganda encouraging participation which suffuses many election campaigns. Equally common in conceptions of liberal democcracy is the idea that electors participate for the
instrumental reason of wanting to influence the actions of government. Although a long series of studies has shown how little the ordinary voter knows about government policies, there is no doubt that responses to perceived differences in the general policy images of the parties or their candidates are among the motives for participation. It is here that the forces governing the elector's two choices —whether to vote and how to vote—come together, and many of the factors which may lead the voter to prefer one party to another become forces inducing him to participate. Thus, the explanation of differing levels of participation offered by Lipset and his colleagues (1954) relies heavily on the assumption that electors will have used their ballot for instrumental purposes. An attempt to explain participation mainly in these terms is confronted, however, by the obvious difficulty that a voter who knows that he is a minuscule part of the whole may think that his behavior will have very little effect on the result. There are really two questions here: whether the voter thinks that his ballot can influence the immediate electoral result and whether the voter thinks that the electoral result can influence the further course of government. As to the first, the familiar tendency for turnout to be higher when the party vote is close presumably reflects some sort of calculus of possible influence. Yet there is really very little data on either of these points. This information would be especially important in the analysis of electoral behavior within multiparty systems, in which elaborate bargaining among political leaders may intervene between popular elections and the formation of governments. [See POLITICAL EFFICACY.] Participation may also be expressive behavior, an act which is undertaken for gratifications that are not related to any policy of government. Many writers have commented on the similarity of the psychological involvement of mass publics in political contests and the involvement of spectators in sporting contests. Certainly, the vernacular of Western political competition is rich with the idiom of sport, and much of the political interest of electorates is similar to the interest shown by mass sporting publics. The expressive functions of voting broaden the sources of participation to include subconscious, or "nonrational," factors (Lane 1959a), as in the case of voters whose adult partisan commitments express a rebellion against the political beliefs of their parents. [See PERSONALITY, POLITICAL.] Of factors which may inhibit participation, none has received wider attention than the phenomenon of "cross pressures," which was first made prom-
VOTING inent in the work of Lazarsfeld and his associates (1944). Many studies have observed that electors who are subject to contradictory partisan stimuli will tend to defer their vote decisions or not vote at all. Thus, Allardt and Bruun (1956) have found that political participation among the Swedishlanguage minority in Finland is greater in areas of high Swedish concentration than it is in areas where the intermingling of Swedish-speaking and Finnish-speaking people can lead to substantial cross pressures. The theoretical point of view underlying the cross pressure hypothesis is that of theories of cognitive dissonance: confronted with dissonant stimuli (for example, middle-class work associates who are Republican; Catholic coreligionists who are Democratic), the elector resolves the conflict by putting the voting act out of mind. However, it is by no means clear how often the deferred or reduced participation of cross-pressured subjects should be taken as evidence of genuine avoidance behavior. Persons whose political stimuli are not mutually reinforcing will naturally have less strongly one-sided preferences and will therefore be less motivated to vote so as to affect outcomes or express symbolic support. But this is far from total withdrawal from voting motivated by a desire to resolve a situation of dynamic conflict. [See CROSS PRESSURE.] A more diffuse set of ideas surrounds the assertion, variously rendered, that limited participation indicates the "alienation" of the citizenry from the party system, the regime, or society as a whole. Closely related is the concept of anomie, although the withdrawal of the anomie citizen from social and political participation presupposes less actual hostility on his part than on the part of the alienated citizen. The theoretical discussions of alienation and anomie may have extended a good deal beyond the evidence, yet they have shown that the low sense of political efficacy found in many nonvoters is linked to a more general sense of their lack of competence in dealing with various aspects of the social environment (Milbrath 1965). Those who consider nonparticipation to be simply the consequence of political uninterest and those who consider it the consequence of actual alienation from politics tend to offer very different judgments of the prospects of liberal democracy. The pessimistic view is that the changing structure of society, involving a disintegration of relationships binding the individual to the wider social order, tends to produce a mass society characterized by low participation and high potential support for extremist or authoritarian movements. But those who see nonparticipation as a sign of acquies-
391
cent uninterest maintain that the presence of a nonparticipating stratum prevents the polarization of society into fanatical political elements, and that the relative freedom of this stratum from partisan bias allows it periodically to supply the needed support for political change. [See DEMOCRACY.] Partisanship and political socialization. Empirical studies of voting quickly shattered the naive view of the elector as unbiased juror reaching a fresh verdict in each election. Research showed that, on the contrary, many electors had very longestablished partisan attachments, "standing decisions" in V. O. Key's phrase, which deeply influenced their perception of contemporary candidates, issues, and political events. The tendency for these dispositions to color the partisan voter's response to new elements of politics (Lane & Sears 1964; Sullivan 1966) lessens the amplitude of change in the electorate as a whole and tends to increase the stability of party systems. What is more, although the relationship is a complex one, data from several nations suggests that because political interest and information tend to increase with strength of partisanship, the less informed, less interested elector may be the one more likely to change his vote and to bring about a change of government (Daudt 1961). Studies of both adult electors and children have shown that partisan ties often extend back deep into childhood, with the family as the main agency of political socialization. Greenstein (1965) has found the frequency of party identification among a sample of schoolchildren in one New England city to be as great as in the youngest age groups of the American adult population. Adult studies relying on recall of early partisanship have repeatedly shown that large majorities of electors continue to hold the party allegiances of their parents. These findings are far from unambiguous, however, since parents give their children a social location in terms of class and other factors which have partisan significance in adult life, quite apart from the child's exposure to political values in the home (Lane 1959b). The relative importance of family, school, friendship groups, and other influences in the early years of the political life cycle is increasingly the focus of research. Such work is by no means confined to the development of partisanship; many types of affective and cognitive orientations to politics have come under review (Hess & Easton I960; Hyman 1959). [See SOCIALIZATION, article on POLITICAL SOCIALIZATION.] In general, the longer a party allegiance is held, the stronger it becomes. Measures of the strength of party identification have repeatedly been found
392
VOTING
to increase with age (Michigan . . . I960; McPhee & Ferguson 1962). The relative plasticity of party ties in younger voters partly accounts for the phenomenon of political "generations"—differences in the direction of partisanship among age cohorts. Voters entering the electorate in a period which is strongly favorable to one party are likely to hold the same party allegiance in later years; thus, the great depression's generation of American voters held a Democratic partisanship and the first postwar generation of British voters kept a party allegiance to Labour. [See GENERATIONS, article on POLITICAL GENERATIONS.]
Political systems vary in the amount of shortterm electoral change. In some systems, such as the Norwegian (Valen & Katz 1964), where party loyalties are tightly bound to a social structure which itself changes little, there is slight variation of party preference between elections, although the variation still may be enough to bring a change of government. In other systems, such as the American, in which the ties of party identification to social-structural factors are looser, substantial shortterm change may occur even in the absence of change in the electorate's underlying party loyalties. Understanding the interplay of basic partisan predispositions and short-run party preferences can help in the analysis of immediate forces on the electorate, preventing mistakes of interpretation which can be made if enduring dispositions are not taken into account (Converse et al. 1961). Class and group influences. In many cases early learning of political attitudes within the family involves the perception of political values appropriate to the family's social identity. Thus, a workingclass child may perceive that his parents are Labour because of their class or a Negro child may perceive that his parents are Democratic because of their race. In fact, a wide range of class, regional, ethnic, racial, religious, and other identifications may be involved in long-term partisan commitments and shorter-term movements of political opinion. [See IDENTIFICATION, POLITICAL.] The ways in which these identifications are related to party will vary greatly. In general terms, we may speak of three types of relationship— interest-related, symbolic, and subcultural, or normative. Where the relationship involves some interest, those identified with a given group accord support to a party out of a sense of some benefit actually or potentially accruing to the group. A well-defined example of such a tie is the appeal of rival parties to social classes whose interests are seen as opposed. The "democratic class struggle," in S. M. Lipset's phrase, has probably been the most
obtrusive basis of partisanship in Western political systems, and parliamentary revisions of Marxist thought, the most widely accepted explanation of group voting. Empirical studies have cast doubt on the idea that class consciousness, in any full Marxist sense, plays much of a role in the thinking of mass publics (Eulau 1955); yet the tie between class and party still may be interest related for the person who sees a party as favoring his class, even if he does not consider any other class or party particularly hostile. Other examples of interest-related group voting are plentiful enough. A series of sectional interests have influenced the alignments of American electoral history, and regional or sectional interests have competed with class as the basis of party alignments in a number of Western nations. Sectional interests may be primarily economic, as they were in the struggles over American tariff policy for more than a century. But they may also reflect important ethnic, racial, or religious interests, as in the long sectional conflict leading to the withdrawal of Ireland from the United Kingdom. The interests of a group may attach individually to its members or they may attach more to the group as a collective whole, conferring primarily psychological benefits on members or identifiers. But some ties between group and party which have demonstrable effects on voting lie so far outside the concept of interest as to constitute a symbolic relationship. This was true, for example, of the massive influences on American voting behavior of the two candidacies of Roman Catholics for the presidency. There is no evidence that either Protestant or Roman Catholic voters expected major policy changes affecting religion if John Kennedy were elected president; their reaction to his candidacy had to do rather with the symbolism of a Catholic assuming the presidency. The processes by which voters are bound to political leaders on the basis of class, racial, ethnic, or even geographic identifications are very similar. A good deal of class or group voting, however, must be ascribed to the acceptance of subcultural norms. Party attachments, particularly long-established ones, may simply pass into the content of a given subculture and be maintained in much the same way as differences of dress, speech, or childrearing are maintained between classes, regions, and racial groups. Because conformance to normative expectations is involved here, some writers have connected this type of behavior to the concept of role (Eulau 1962). Participation, as well as party attitudes, may involve conformity of this kind, and turnout differences between men and
VOTING women have been treated in terms of culturally defined roles (Michigan . . . 1960). Any of these types of group effects, but especially symbolic or normative influence, will depend on the strength of the individual's attachment to the group; the stronger his identification, the more likely he is to behave politically in accord with the group. The psychological identifications involved here may be quite unrelated to formal membership, although the relationship of "objective" criteria to "subjective" identifications, explored most extensively in the case of social class (Centers 1949; Eulau 1962), is itself an important area of inquiry. Once it is distinguished from formal membership, the concept of identification can include the negative identifications of those who may be hostile to a class or group. Thus, the endorsement of trade unions may be the kiss of death for a political candidate seeking office in an area which is strongly hostile to unions. Face-to-face ("primary") groups may play an important role in making effective the standards of a wider ("secondary") group, particularly when group effects involve the acceptance of political norms. Berelson and his associates (1954) have indeed argued that this is the principal means by which group differences are preserved and that the sharpening of secondary-group differences during an election campaign is the natural consequence of the convergence of opinion within the network of face-to-face groups which forms within a class or other social group. The relationship between primary-group and secondary-group influence is a complex one. The face-to-face group may, for example, determine the receptiveness of the individual to the political standards of the wider group; a worker may owe his attitude toward the trade union to his workmates and be accessible to union political influence only if his co-workers identify positively with the union. Variation in the strength of individual identification, in the closeness of the symbolic ties or interests which connect group to party, in the clarity of a group's political standards—all of these can produce differences of group effects over time or between political systems. Comparative measurement has been most satisfactory in the case of social class. Alford (1963) has compared class voting across five nations of the Anglo-American culture area, offering a range of explanations for the sharp differences found. Converse (1958) has compared the extent of class voting in America over a 12-year period, proposing that the condition of the economy is a fundamental determinant of the level of class "polarization."
393
Political information and public issues. Compared with traditional democratic beliefs, the findings of modern voting research present a sobering account of the information actually possessed by the electorate. Many electors are, of course, well informed, but the gradient of knowledge is so steep that very large parts of the public are, indeed, ignorant of very elementary political facts—such as, in the American case, the identity of the party holding a majority of seats in Congress (Stokes & Miller 1962). The limits to the public's information force substantial revision of the liberal democratic view of the role of issues in electoral choice. However reasonable it may have seemed in an era of restricted franchise to think of electors as perceiving the decisions of government in much the same terms as they were seen by the decision makers themselves, such a view is almost wholly fanciful when applied to mass electorates. Contemporary studies which have probed the public's knowledge of detailed issues leave little doubt that this knowledge is typically slight. Sometimes the conclusion drawn from such evidence is that issues play no real part in electoral choice, a view which is easily reinforced by evidence that most party loyalties go back far beyond the political issues of the day. This conclusion must be sharply qualified, however, if "issues" is understood to mean something more than the immediate, detailed policy questions confronting government. Many more people, including many long-term partisans, can be shown to have some sort of conception of what the parties or other elites contending for power have done in the past and would be likely to do in the future, and these conceptions are of demonstrable importance for electoral choice. That is to say, the diffuse images of the parties have discernible issue elements, and these help sustain the party loyalties of the relatively committed and help sway the party choices of the less committed (Key 1966). The cognitive structure of these issue beliefs is still relatively unexplored (Michigan . . . I960; Converse 1964). It is clear, however, that the parties' images can differ without the parties actually taking divergent positions as to what government should do. Some of the great issues of electoral politics do involve a marked difference of view both at the elite and mass levels about what ought to be done; America's entry into the League of Nations presumably was such a position issue. But many issues of electoral importance do not involve such a difference of belief either between the contending party elites or between the parties'
394
VOTING
mass supporters. In these cases the parties gain or lose support to the extent that they are associated in the public's mind with a condition or goal which is valued positively or negatively by the entire electorate. In modern times economic prosperity has been a clear example of such a valence, or image, issue: all of the parties and the entire electorate typically want it, but there may be widely diverging views as to how likely the parties are to achieve it. A concern with cognitive and motivational elements of the public's response to issues has broadened the relevance of voting research to the study of a larger political order. Electoral research has an obvious role to play in formulating and testing theories of the party system, such as the models of party competition adumbrated by Hotelling (1929), Smithies (1941), and Downs (1957) on the analogy of economic competition in spatial markets. Equally, an understanding of the public's response to issues can clarify the normative and descriptive issues of democratic theory, as Janowitz and Marvick (1956) have argued in their elaboration of the thought of Schumpeter. Clarifying the nature and extent of popular influence in government will require a knowledge of more than what is in the voter's mind. But all theories of democracy must contain propositions about the public's response to the actions of government and the proposed actions of those who contend for electoral support. Assessing the adequacy of such propositions is widely recognized as a task for future electoral studies. DONALD E. STOKES [See also ELECTIONS; POLITICAL PARTICIPATION; PUBLIC OPINION. Directly related are the entries LEGISLATION, article on LEGISLATIVE BEHAVIOR; PARTIES, POLITICAL; REPRESENTATION, article on REPRESENTATIONAL BEHAVIOR. Other relevant material may be found in COMMUNICATION, POLITICAL; POLITICAL BEHAVIOR; POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
ALFORD, ROBERT R. 1963 Party and Society: The AngloAmerican Democracies. Chicago: Rand McNally. ALLARDT, ERIK 1964 Patterns of Class Conflict and Working Class Consciousness in Finnish Politics. Westermarck Society, Transactions 10:97-131. ALLARDT, ERIK; and BRUUN, K. 1956 Characteristics of the Finnish Non-voter. Westermarck Society, Transactions 3:13-25. ALMOND, GABRIEL A.; and VERBA, SIDNEY 1963 The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations. Princeton Univ. Press. BERELSON, BERNARD; LAZARSFELD, PAUL F.; and McPHEE, WILLIAM N. 1954 Voting: A Study of Opinion For-
mation in a Presidential Campaign. Univ. of Chicago Press. BURNHAM, WALTER D. 1965 The Changing Shape of the American Political Universe. American Political Science Review 59:7—28. BUTLER, DAVID E.; and KING, ANTHONY 1965 The British General Election of 1964. London: Macmillan. BUTLER, DAVID E.; and ROSE, RICHARD 1960 The British General Election of 1959. London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martins. CAMPBELL, ANGUS; GURIN, GERALD; and MILLER, WARREN E. 1954 The Voter Decides. Evanston, 111.: Row, Peterson. CENTERS, RICHARD (1949) 1961 The Psychology of Social Classes: A Study of Class Consciousness. New York: Russell. CONVERSE, PHILIP E. 1958 The Shifting Role of Class in Political Attitudes and Behavior. Pages 388-399 in Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, Readings in Social Psychology. 3d ed. New York: Holt. CONVERSE, PHILIP E. 1964 The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics. Pages 206-261 in David E. Apter (editor), Ideology and Discontent. New York: Free Press. CONVERSE, PHILIP E.; and DUPEUX, GEORGES 1962 Politicization of the Electorate in France and the United States. Public Opinion Quarterly 26:1-23. CONVERSE, PHILIP E. et al. 1961 Stability and Change in I960: A Reinstating Election. American Political Science Review 55:269-280. CUTRIGHT, PHILLIPS; and Rossi, PETER H. 1958 Grass Roots Politicians and the Vote. American Sociological Review 23:171-179. DAUDT, HARRY 1961 Floating Voters and the Floating Vote: A Critical Analysis of American and British Election Studies. Leiden (Netherlands): Kroese. [DEGRAS, HARRY E.]; GRAY, A. P.; and PEAR, R. H. 1956 How People Vote: A Study of Electoral Behaviour in Greenwich, by Mark Benney [pseud.]. . . . London: Routledge. DOWNS, ANTHONY 1957 An Economic Theory of Democracy. New York: Harper. DUNCAN, OTIS DUDLEY; CUZZORT, RAY P.; and DUNCAN, BEVERLY 1961 Statistical Geography: Problems in Analyzing Areal Data. New York: Free Press. EULAU, HEINZ 1955 Class Identification and Projection in Voting Behavior. Western Political Quarterly 8:441452. EULAU, HEINZ 1962 Class and Party in the Eisenhower Years: Class Roles and Perspectives in the 1952 and 1956 Elections. New York: Free Press. GOODMAN, LEO A. 1959 Some Alternatives to Ecological Correlation. American Journal of Sociology 64:610625. GREENSTEIN, FRED I. 1965 Children and Politics. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. HESS, ROBERT D.; and EASTON, DAVID 1960 The Child's Image of the President. Public Opinion Quarterly 24: 632-634. HOTELLING, HAROLD 1929 Stability in Competition. Economic Journal 39:41-57. HYMAN, HERBERT H. 1959 Political Socialization: A Study in the Psychology of Political Behavior. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. JANOWITZ, MORRIS; and MARVICK, DWAINE (1956) 1964 Competitive Pressure and Democratic Consent: An Interpretation of the 1952 Presidential Election. 2d ed.
VOTING University of Michigan, Governmental Studies, No. 32. Chicago: Quadrangle Books. KEY, V. O. JR. 1966 The Responsible Electorate: Rationality in Presidential Voting, 1936-1960. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. -» Published posthumously. KEY, V. O. JR.; and MONGER, FRANK J. 1959 Social Determinism and Electoral Decision: The Case of Indiana. Pages 281-299 in Eugene Burdick and Arthur J. Brodbeck (editors), American Voting Behavior. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. LANE, ROBERT E. 1959a Political Life: Why People Get Involved in Politics. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. -> A paperback edition was published in 1965. LANE, ROBERT E. 1959b Fathers and Sons: The Foundations of Political Belief. American Sociological Review 24:502-510. LANE, ROBERT E.; and SEARS, DAVID O. 1964 Public Opinion. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. LAZARSFELD, PAUL F.; BERELSON, BERNARD; and GAUDET, HAZEL (1944) 1960 The People's Choice: How the Voter Makes Up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign. 2d ed. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. LIPSET, SEYMOUR M. 1960 Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. LIPSET, SEYMOUR M. et al. (1954) 1959 The Psychology of Voting: An Analysis of Political Behavior. Volume 2, pages 1124-1175, in Gardner Lindzey (editor), Handbook of Social Psychology. Cambridge, Mass.: Addison-Wesley. McPHEE, WILLIAM N. 1963 Formal Theories of Mass Behavior. New York: Free Press. McPHEE, WILLIAM N.; and FERGUSON, JACK 1962 Political Immunization. Pages 123-154 in William N. McPhee and William A. Glaser (editors), Public Opinion and Congressional Elections. New York: Free Press. MATTHEWS, DONALD R.; and PROTHRO, JAMES W. 1966 Negroes and the New Southern Politics. New York: Harcourt. MERRIAM, CHARLES E.; and GOSNELL, HAROLD F. 1924 Non-voting: Causes and Methods of Control. Univ. of Chicago Press. MICHIGAN, UNIVERSITY OF, SURVEY RESEARCH CENTER 1960 The American Voter, by Angus Campbell et al. New York: Wiley. MILBRATH, LESTER W. 1965 Political Participation: How and Why Do People Get Involved in Politics? Chicago: Rand McNally. MILLER, WARREN E. 1956 One Party Politics and the Voter. American Political Science Review 50:707-725. MILLER, WARREN E.; and STOKES, DONALD E. 1963 Constituency Influence in Congress. American Political Science Review 57:45-56. MILNE, R. S. and MACKENZIE, H. C. 1954 Straight Fight: A Study of Voting Behaviour in the Constituency of Bristol North-east at the General Election of 1951. London: Hansard Society.
395
MILNE, R. S.; and MACKENZIE, H. C. 1958 Marginal Seat, 1955: A Study of Voting Behaviour in the Constituency of Bristol North-east at the General Election of 1955. London: Hansard Society. OGBURN, WILLIAM F.; and TALBOT, NELL S. 1929 A Measurement of the Factors in the Presidential Election of 1928. SociaZ Forces 8:175-183. POOL, ITHIEL DE SOLA; ABELSON, ROBERT P.; and POPKIN, SAMUEL L. (1964) 1965 Candidates, Issues, and Strategies: A Computer Simulation of the 1960 and 1964 Presidential Elections. Rev. ed. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press. ROBINSON, W. S. 1950 Ecological Correlations and the Behavior of Individuals. American Sociological Review 15:351-357. SCHUMPETER, JOSEPH A. (1942) 1950 Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. 3d ed. New York: Harper; London: Allen & Unwin. -» A paperback edition was published by Harper in 1962. SELLERS, CHARLES 1965 The Equilibrium Cycle in Twoparty Politics. Public Opinion Quarterly 39:16-38. SIEGFRIED, ANDRE 1913 Tableau politique de la France de I'ouest sous la Troisieme Republique. Paris: Colin. SILVA, RUTH C. 1962 Rum, Religion and Votes: 1928 Re-examined. University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press. SMITHIES, ARTHUR 1941 Optimum Location in Spatial Competition. Journal of Political Economy 49:423429. STOKES, DONALD E. 1965 A Variance Components Model of Political Effects. Pages 61-85 in John Claunch (editor), Mathematical Applications in Political Science. Dallas, Texas: Arnold Foundation. STOKES, DONALD E.; and IVERSEN, GUDMUND R. 1962 On the Existence of Forces Restoring Party Competition. Public Opinion Quarterly 26:159-171. STOKES, DONALD E.; and MILLER, WARREN E. 1962 Party Government and the Saliency of Congress. Public Opinion Quarterly 26:531-546. SULLIVAN, DENIS G. 1966 Psychological Balance and Reactions to the Presidential Nominations of 1960. Pages 238-264 in M. Kent Jennings and L. Harmon Zeigler (editors), The Electoral Process. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. TELSER, LESTER G. 1963 Least-squares Estimates of Transition Probabilities. Pages 270-292 in Measurement in Economics: Studies in Mathematical Economics and Econometrics in Memory of Yehuda Grunfeld, by Carl F. Christ et al. Stanford Univ. Press. VALEN, HENRY; and KATZ, DANIEL 1964 Political Parties in Norway: A Community Study. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. VANGREVELINGE, G. 1961 Etude composee des resultats des referendums de 1958 et 1961. Review of Statistical Applications 9:83-100. WEINER, MYRON; and KOTHARI, RAJNI (editors) 1965 Indian Voting Behaviour: Studies of the 1962 General Elections. Calcutta: Mukhopadhyay.
WAGERING See GAMBLING.
WAGES i. n. in. iv. v.
THEORY STRUCTURE SYSTEMS OF PAYMENT WAGE AND HOUR LEGISLATION FRINGE BENEFITS
Allan M. Cartter Melvin W. Reder Robert B. McKersie N. Arnold Tolles Peter Henle
THEORY
The majority of adults in industrial societies participate in economic life as wage or salary earners; thus, the principles determining the level of remuneration for labor are among the most interesting aspects of economic theory. At the same time, however, because the exchange of services for pay involves a personal relationship between employer and employee, wage determination is complicated by a variety of human actions and responses and by various institutional arrangements for reaching and enforcing contractual agreements. Economic exchanges involving commodities are essentially impersonal; economic exchanges involving labor services have more direct and far-reaching implications for human relationships and personal welfare. These relationships have evolved through the centuries, and man's explanation of the determinants of economic rewards has evolved with them. In preindustrial society the role and position of the laborer were commonly prescribed by custom or law—whether the economic relationship was one of master and slave, lord and serf, or craftsman
and apprentice. With few exceptions, economic units were small, and despite the rigid pattern of social structure the master-employer had certain obligations and responsibilities toward those dependent upon him. With the rise of modern industrial society, the size of representative economic units expanded markedly, and work relationships became increasingly depersonalized. Largely as a result of the economies of large-scale production, new institutional forms have evolved to carry on the labor and entrepreneurial functions. The corporation and the trade union are modern social inventions representing employer and employee, and wage contracts in Western industrial societies are frequently arrived at through collective bargaining or through arbitration by third parties. In preindustrial society wages were determined largely by custom and tradition, external factors permitting. The external constraints in the short run were the vagaries of crop successes or failures, pestilence, and war. In the long run, the margin of subsistence set a lower limit to wage rates (or their premarket equivalent), and the available food supply set an upper limit. In most preindustrial societies in the past, as is true in many parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America today, population growth tended to keep pace with or outstrip the expansion of food supplies, and wages for the great bulk of the population remained close to the minimum subsistence level. In the early years of commercial and industrial societies, market wage systems developed, and work relationships became increasingly impersonal. A more legalistic contractual attitude toward employment was associated with the gradual withdrawal of a sense of obligation by employer, church, or state for the welfare of the individual
397
398
WAGES: Theory
worker and the resulting creation of a highly (although often imperfectly) competitive labor market. Coincident with this growth of a more market-oriented economy came corresponding social and political freedoms that had not been present in the earlier tradition-bound societies, and the rate of economic growth began to exceed population growth. For those who quickly benefited from the rapid growth of economic opportunities, such as skilled workers, shopkeepers, entrepreneurs, and professional men, this meant great social progress; for those who remained among the less skilled and were entirely dependent upon market forces over which they had little control, the appeal of alternative systems that would restrict or destroy the free market economy was frequently enhanced. If by outward appearances the nineteenth century was characterized by impersonal market forces in the determination of wages and prices, the twentieth century has appeared to be a century of regulated or administered prices. Wage settlements are more frequently made by agreement between collective agencies, sometimes under the duress of public or government pressure, and occasionally within the framework of governmental regulation of wages. To the casual observer it may seem that wages are no longer determined by market forces, but by men; that money wages are no longer the result of the interplay of many economic variables, but the initial datum to which the economy must adapt; and that political forces have replaced economic forces in wage determination. A review of wage theory, however, suggests that, despite these outward appearances, market forces still determine the level of real wages (i.e., wages measured in terms of purchasing power) for employed members of the labor force. The same economic forces are present in a free market economy, a government-regulated economy, or an economy with complete state ownership of property and capital. Arbitrarily determined money wage rates cannot determine real wages or lead to the most efficient levels of employment in various lines of activity, and the principles of contemporary wage theory are applicable to a centralized economy seeking national guides for resource allocation as well as to a decentralized market economy. Historically, there have been four broad schools of thought concerning the determination of wages. These are usually referred to as the subsistence theory of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the wages-fund theory of the mid-nineteenth century, the marginal productivity theory of the very late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, and the bargaining power theory of the
twentieth century. Each has emphasized a different aspect of wage determination, although the contemporary marginal productivity theory might be said to include each of the others. Broadly interpreted, none of the other three is incorrect—each is merely incomplete. Classical wage theory. The subsistence theory of wages is attributed largely to the French physiocratic school, particularly to Turgot and Quesnay. Later variations of it are found in Say, Adam Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, Torrens, and Marx, among others. Essentially this was a labor supply theory, assuming certain "natural" tendencies in population growth and stressing the replacement cost of the labor force. As most clearly articulated by Malthus and Ricardo, the theory held that population tends to grow more rapidly then the supply of food, keeping the bulk of the population at or near subsistence. The subsistence level of wages, termed the "natural" wage by Ricardo, effectively sets the long-run limit on population. The market wage, if it rises above the natural level, encourages larger families (or a higher survival rate). This gradually expands labor supply and depresses the market wage rate. If the market rate were below the subsistence level, families would delay having children (or fewer would survive to adulthood), and the market wage would again tend to seek the natural level. This theory, termed the "iron law of wages," was a pessimistic view of future economic development but not an entirely unrealistic one as judged by the experience of previous centuries. The standard of living of the common laborer had improved temporarily after the great plague swept Europe in the fourteenth century but had again declined to near subsistence and remained there until the nineteenth century. The later adherents to the subsistence-wage doctrine—Torrens, Ricardo, and Marx—allowed for some variation in the "customary" minimum standards of living. Thus the minimum level in Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century was, in most countries and in most years, well above the bare subsistence level. By the third quarter of the century, when J. S. Mill was writing, it was evident that living standards in England, France, and the United States were not only considerably above subsistence but steadily rising, thus holding out a more hopeful picture of the future. Among the major political economists in the classical tradition, Marx alone predicted increasing misery for the working class. This view was predicated on the observed gradual disappearance of the yeoman class, as the machine displaced the master craftsman, and on the presumed enlargement of the working class living at the subsistence
WAGES: Theory margin. To Marx this was a distinguishing feature of industrial capitalism, the contrast being the more marked because it was accompanied by a rapid accumulation of capital by the entrepreneurial class. Thus, the industrial society automatically produced a "reserve army of the unemployed" through technological displacement. Marx did not live long enough to see clearly the creation of a new and expanding middle class or to observe the steadily rising living standards enjoyed by the laboring classes under modern industrial conditions. He was a keener critic of contemporary social conditions than he was a prophet. The wages-fund theory of the mid-nineteenth century was a logical successor to the subsistence theory, for it assumed the same economic properties except for the inevitable adjustment of population to economic conditions. Whereas the earlier writers had focused their attention primarily on the supply side of the market, the later writers tried to explain the determinants of labor demand. As expressed by J. S. Mill, the theory held that at any one time there was a fixed fund from which wages could be advanced to labor in anticipation of the production and sale of marketable goods. This stock of capital, referred to as a "wages fund," might grow over time as a nation accumulated wealth through savings and reinvestment. At any moment, however, the fund must be divided by the number of laborers; the larger the labor force, the lower the wage. Attempts by workers to raise their wages could only be successful at the cost of unemployment or the reduction of the wages of other workers. Although Mill held out more hope than had Malthus or Ricardo that rising aspirations would retard population growth and thus help to raise wage levels, he placed primary emphasis upon the accumulation of wealth as a means of enlarging the wages fund and raising wage levels. The weakness of the early classical wage theories lay in assuming a relatively fixed demand for labor, fixed either by available food supplies or by a wages fund. Particularly in the latter case, the present stock of capital was emphasized, rather than the flow of commodities that could be produced with available resources, including labor. Both theories are more nearly applicable to a preindustrial society without the means of credit creation; in such societies they have some applicability even today. Marginal productivity theory. The marginal productivity theory of wages was independently developed by a number of economists near the close of the nineteenth century. Although von Thiinen in Germany was an early precursor of this school, Wicksell in Sweden, Walras in France, Jevons,
399
Wicksteed, and Marshall in England, Barone in Italy, and J. B. Clark in the United States all contributed to the rapid emergence of the theory between 1880 and 1900. Strictly speaking, marginal productivity is not a theory of wages, but a principle concerning the nature of the demand for factors of production. It is a special application of the law of diminishing returns, expressing the direct functional relationship between the quantity of a factor employed and its product. Thus, in a simple two-factor model, if the quantity of capital is held constant and increments of labor are added, the total product will increase at a decreasing rate. The application of this principle to the determination of wages is that if an employer is acting so as to maximize his net returns, he will continue to employ more labor as long as the marginal product of labor exceeds the wage cost of the added laborers. Equilibrium for the individual firm occurs where the wage is just equal to labor's marginal product, and similarly for other factors of production. J. B. Clark (1899) constructed the most elaborate theory around the marginal productivity principle. Assuming a fixed (inelastic) supply of labor (i.e., constant population, level of skills, etc.), conditions of perfect competition, and long-run general equilibrium in a static state, he indicated that marginal productivity would determine a unique level of real wages. Each factor of production would receive a return just equal to its marginal product, and the sum of factor returns would just exhaust the total product. The latter condition is satisfied if the production function is a homogeneous function of the first degree (Wicksteed 1894), or if each firm is producing at minimum unit cost under conditions of competitive equilibrium (Walras 1874-1877; Wicksell 1893; Hicks 1932, appendix). Clark's theory was expressed in real terms for the economy as a whole; for the individual firm under perfect competition, equilibrium would be achieved at that level of employment where the wage was equal to the value of the marginal product. The theory of pricing under conditions of imperfect competition, which developed in the 1930s, states that the equilibrium rule for a single employer is to equate the marginal wage cost (which under conditions of monopsony may be greater than the wage paid to the marginal laborer) with labor's marginal revenue product (E. H. Chamberlin 1933; Joan Robinson 1933). The marginal productivity theory as a complete and determinate theory of wages in the real world is subject to many criticisms. First, the supply of
400
WAGES: Theory
labor is not absolutely fixed even in the short run, although some debate continues as to whether the supply curve is positively sloped or backward bending. In the long run the supply of labor, as the early classical writers maintained, is at least partly dependent upon the level of real wages. Similarly, the supply of other factors of production—most notably capital—is not entirely independent of the level of wages, for changes in wage rates affect the level of investment both through their impact on profit rates and on the level of savings out of wage earners' incomes. At the level of the individual firm, difficulties arise in applying the theory because of imperfections in knowledge on the part of both workers and employers, indivisibilities due to technical factors, immobility, and marked imperfections in competition both in product and labor markets. The marginal productivity principle is still a valuable analytic tool, but a large number of variations must be developed to handle cases with different combinations of supply and demand conditions under varying degrees of competition (Dunlop 1944). The analysis of the short-run demand for labor by the firm has grown more complicated as business and industry have become more complex. Technical factors increasingly dictate inflexible factor proportions in the short run; the influence of relative factor prices appears more in the design of new plants and in the character of innovation than it does in short-run adjustments of employment. Similarly, the administrative organization of the production process frequently protects certain jobs or groups of employees from the market through internal promotion, seniority rights, the accumulation of benefits, etc. Just as the military ordinarily "hires" only privates and lieutenants and may depart substantially from market norms in the pay of sergeants and colonels, so too the large modern corporation is partially veiled from market forces. Increasing attention in recent years has been paid to "wage structure" and "job clusters," because investigators recognize that in an age of increasing differentiation of labor skills it is difficult to give empirical content to the concept of the wage rate for a homogeneous labor unit (International Economic Association 1957; Reynolds 1951). It has often been said that the marginal productivity concept provides the framework for a theory of wages for the economy as a whole and for a theory of employment for the individual firm; that is to say, the aggregate supply of labor is relatively fixed (at least for periods of less than a generation), and marginal productivity therefore "deter-
mines" the level of real wages for the economy as a whole. The individual firm, however, faces a much more elastic labor-supply situation, and within a fairly narrow range, wage rates are "determined" by certain external constraints—e.g., by the prevailing wage in the local labor market, by what other firms in the same industry are currently paying, etc. For the firm, therefore, variations in the demand for labor are more likely to result in changes in employment than in major wage adjustments. Recent developments. At the level of the firm and the industry, much greater attention has been paid in recent years to the determinants of supply in the presence of a trade union. The early literature treated this as a classic case of monopsony, and the theory of bilateral monopoly pricing was applied to the situation of a strong trade union bargaining with a large employer. This assumed, however, that the union pursued a course analogous to the business firm and, as a monopolistic "seller" of labor, attempted to maximize returns over and above supply costs. Since the union does not incur the costs of supplying labor and the ordinary supply schedule reflects the reservation prices of its various individual members, this approach has been largely discarded as being an inadequate explanation of trade union behavior (Dunlop 1944; Ross 1948). Impressed with the power of trade unions and the indeterminateriess of the bilateral monopoly solution, some writers (e.g., John Davidson 1898; Maurice Dobb 1928) attempted to explain wage determination on the basis of the relative bargaining power of employers and employees. A bargaining power theory of wages is obviously an incomplete theory, for if bargaining power were the only factor, much greater variation in wage levels would be apparent. However, with the development of mathematical game theory in recent years, there has been renewed interest in bargaining models. The Danish economist Zeuthen (1930) was perhaps the first to develop a sophisticated bargaining model applicable to economic situations. Later mathematical variants (Pen 1952; Shackle 1957; Cross 1965) and nonmathematical variants (Schelling 1956; Chamberlain 1955) have come closer to a description of economic processes in the real world. The advantage of such models is twofold : first, they illuminate the strategy of bargaining, presenting it as a many-dimensional problem; second, they provide a solution which, at least in theory, is determinate. Unlike the earlier advocates of a bargaining-power theory of wages, recent contributors attempt to develop a bargaining model
WAGES: Theory within the framework of the more traditional supply and demand analysis (Pen 1950; Cartter 1959). Traditional neoclassical wage theory is at its best in describing the determinants of the real level of wages for the economy as a whole, and it has proved useful—if somewhat less well adapted—in explaining money wages and employment behavior at the level of the firm. The weakest link has been the aggregative theory of money wages. Prior to Keynes, it was assumed that the real wage solution for the economy as a whole could be simply converted into money terms. Keynes questioned the symmetry of this conversion, stressing a "money illusion" on the part of wage earners and the possibility of an underemployment equilibrium. Two general approaches have been made to the problem within the Keynesian framework. One is to analyze the equilibrium level of real output, attained by the intersection of aggregate demand and supply functions as the money wage level shifts, with given assumptions about the labor-productivity function. In such a model only slight variations in the parameters can produce an aggregate moneysupply function for labor which is positively sloped (the classical assumption), negatively sloped (the underconsumptionist assumption), or nearly vertical (the Keynesian assumption). (See Weintraub 1958.) The second approach is through an aggregate distribution model that attempts to view the interrelationship of the share of income going to labor and the determination of an equilibrium level of total income. Such models suggest that the share of total income going to labor is closely interdependent with spending and savings decisions in other sectors of the economy, profit distributions, the degree of monopoly, and related factors (Boulding 1951; Kalecki 1954; Bronfenbrenner 1956; Cartter 1959; Kaldor 1956). Thus, the over-all share of income going to labor is not uniquely determined by wage decisions of employers and employees, for these decisions may or may not be compatible with other sets of decisions made by consumers and investors. The wage share is represented in some contemporary growth models as a dependent variable, and attempts by trade unions to fix this share artificially through wage agreements appear as futile as attempts to set the real wage in the static Keynesian model. Empirical studies. Empirical studies of the effect of unionism on wages have been made for several countries, although the subject has been most fully treated in the United States. These studies fall into two classes: those focusing on the
401
effect of unions upon relative wage rates and those concentrating on the aggregate wage share. The former attempt to assess the impact of the union within the firm or industry, either by examining the historical path of wages in organized and unorganized sectors or by a cross-sectional view at a single point in time. It is difficult to obtain conclusive evidence from which one can generalize, since the union impact apparently differs depending upon many other factors—market structure in both labor and product markets, centralization of authority within the union, the phase of the business cycle, etc. The most defensible conclusions, appropriate to advanced industrial countries, are that some (although not all) unions do obtain a relative wage advantage for their members; that wage advantages are usually obtained early in the life of the union and that union wages do not cumulatively diverge from general wage trends; that union wage advantages are most commonly obtained during periods of recession or of price stability and are frequently eroded during periods of rapid inflation; and that the typical magnitude of the relative wage advantage of successful unions is in the range of 10-15 per cent during periods of stable prices (Ross 1948; Rees 1962; Lewis 1963). The second approach, analyzing trends in labor's share of aggregate income, provides less conclusive evidence of the power of organized labor. In most industrial countries, particularly since World War n, labor's share has drifted upward, but the increase does not seem closely correlated with the rise of union power. A disaggregated view suggests that labor's share of income is actually declining in many heavily organized sectors of the economy and rising in the nonunion sectors. This conclusion, however, reflects other compensating changes —the impact of further mechanization and the substitution of capital for labor in heavy-industry sectors and the rapid wage gains made by unorganized lesser-skilled workers in trade and services (which are normally associated with a prolonged period of prosperity). Unfortunately, comparable national income data are not easily available for periods prior to the 1930s, and the evolution of corporate business and other structural changes in the economy obscure a clearer view (Creamer 1950; Levinson 1951; Phelps Brown 1962; Clark Kerr in Taylor & Pierson 1957). Earlier studies by Douglas (1934) for the United States and New South Wales applied a production function that gave distributional results with a close correspondence to historical data for periods between 1890 and 1922. The apparent constancy
402
WAGES: Theory
of labor's share at close to 75 per cent for the United States was consistent with a long-term elasticity of labor demand of — 4.0 and a demand elasticity of — 1.33 for capital. Later studies have stressed the great variability of labor's share in particular employment sectors, both cyclically and over long periods of time. Thirty years ago it appeared that the "laws of production" explained the functional distribution of income. Today it might be more correct to say that the over-all share of income going to labor is determined not in the labor market alone but also by the general determinants of the national income. The focus of interest in the labor market has changed several times over the last fifty years. Wage theory in the first quarter of the century was essentially normative, dealing with perfectly competitive models of the world. In the 1920s and 1930s interest shifted to the structure and role of trade unions and to the institutional aspects of the labor market. Then attention was increasingly focused on the determination of the level of wages under a variety of degrees of market imperfection at the level of the firm, industry, or nation. Recent interest has shifted to the dynamics of the labor market—to the role of wages in aggregate growth models and to the play of veiled market forces in bargaining models. Current wage theory stresses relative wage rates and their movement over time. The interest of economists in the process of economic development—and in the problems of economies at all stages of development—has helped to make wage theory somewhat less parochial and limited in its application only to Western industrial societies than was formerly the case. It has, however, redirected emphasis away from the firm and to an aggregative view of economic variables. ALLAN M. CARTTER [See also INCOME DISTRIBUTION, article on FUNCTIONAL SHARE; LABOR UNIONS, article On INFLUENCE ON WAGES.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
BOULDING, KENNETH E. (1951) 1956 Wages as a Share in the National Income. Pages 123-148 in Institute on the Structure of the Labor Market, American University, Washington, B.C., 1950, The Impact of the Union: Eight Economic Theorists Evaluate the Labor Union Movement. Edited by David McCord Wright. New York: Kelley & Millman. BOWEN, WILLIAM G. 1960 The Wage-Price Issue: A Theoretical Analysis. Princeton Univ. Press. BRONFENBRENNER, MARTIN S. 1956 A Contribution to the Aggregative Theory of Wages. Journal of Political Economy 64:459-469. BROWN, E. H. PHELPS 1962 The Economics of Labor. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press.
CARTTER, ALLAN M. 1959 Theory of Wages and Employment. Homewood, 111.: Irwin. CHAMBERLAIN, NEIL W. 1955 A General Theory of Economic Process. New York: Wiley. CHAMBERLIN, EDWARD H. (1933) 1956 The Theory of Monopolistic Competition: A Re-orientation of the Theory of Value. 7th ed. Harvard Economic Studies, Vol. 38. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. CLARK, JOHN BATES (1899) 1902 The Distribution of Wealth: A Theory of Wages, Interest and Profits. New York and London: Macmillan. CORREA, HECTOR 1963 The Economics of Human Resources. Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing. CREAMER, DANIEL B. 1950 Behavior of Wage Rates During Business Cycles. Occasional Paper No. 34. New York: National Bureau of Economic Research. CROSS, JOHN G. 1965 A Theory of the Bargaining Process. American Economic Review 55:67-94. DAVIDSON, JOHN 1898 The Bargain Theory of Wages: A Critical Development From the Historic Theories. New York: Putnam. DOBB, MAURICE (1928) 1948 Wages. 3d ed., rev. New York: Pitman. DOUGLAS, PAUL H. (1934) 1957 The Theory of Wages. New York: Kelley. DUNLOP, JOHN T. (1944) 1950 Wage Determination Under Trade Unions. New York: Kelley. GUILLEBAUD, CLAUDE W. 1960 Wage Determination and Wages Policy. Welwyn (England): Nisbet. HICKS, J. R. (1932) 1964 The Theory of Wages. 2d ed. New York: St. Martins. INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC ASSOCIATION 1957 The Theory of Wage Determination: Proceedings. Edited by John T. Dunlop. London: Macmillan. KALDOR, NICHOLAS 1956 Alternative Theories of Distribution. Review of Economic Studies 23, no. 2:83-100. KALECKI, MICHAEL (1954) 1965 Theory of Economic Dynamics: An Essay on Cyclical and Long-run Changes in Capitalist Economy. 2d ed., rev. London: Allen & Unwin. KERR, CLARK 1954 Trade-unionism and Distributive Shares. American Economic Review 44:279-316. LEVINSON, HAROLD M. 1951 Unionism, Wage Trends and Income Distribution, 1914—1947. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan, School of Business Administration, Bureau of Business Research. LEWIS, H. GREGG 1963 Unionism and Relative Wages in the United States: An Empirical Inquiry. Univ. of Chicago Press. PEN, JAN (1950) 1959 The Wage Rate Under Collective Bargaining. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. -» First published as De loonvorming in de moderne volkshuishouding. PEN, JAN 1952 A General Theory of Bargaining. American Economic Review 42:24-42. PERLMAN, RICHARD (editor) 1964 Wage Determination: Market or Power Forces? Boston: Heath. REDER, MELVIN W. 1952 The Theory of Union Wage Policy. Review of Economics and Statistics 34:34-55. REES, ALBERT 1962 The Economics of Trade Unions. Univ. of Chicago Press. REYNOLDS, LLOYD G. 1951 The Structure of Labor Markets: Wages and Labor Mobility in Theory and Practice. New York: Harper. REYNOLDS, LLOYD G.; and TAFT, CYNTHIA H. 1956 The Evolution of Wage Structure. Yale Studies in Economics, Vol. 6. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. ROBERTSON, D. J. 1961 The Economics of Wages and the Distribution of Income. London: Macmillan.
WAGES: Structure ROBINSON, JOAN 1933 The Economics of Imperfect Competition. London: Macmillan. Ross, ARTHUR M. (1948) 1956 Trade Union Wage Policy. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press. ROTHSCHILD, KURT W. (1954) 1956 The Theory of Wages. Oxford: Blackwell. SCHELLING, THOMAS C. 1956 An Essay on Bargaining. American Economic Review 46:281-306. SCHULTZ, HENRY 1929 Marginal Productivity and the General Pricing Process. Journal of Political Economy 37:505-551. SHACKLE, G. L. S. 1957 The Nature of the Bargaining Process. Pages 292-314 in International Economic Association, The Theory of Wage Determination: Proceedings of a Conference Held by the International Economic Association. Edited by John T. Dunlop. London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martins. STIGLER, GEORGE J. 1941 Production and Distribution Theories: The Formative Period. New York: Macmillan. TAYLOR, GEORGE W.; and PIERSON, FRANK C. (editors) 1957 New Concepts in Wage Determination. New York: McGraw-Hill. UNIVERSITIES-NATIONAL BUREAU COMMITTEE FOR ECONOMIC RESEARCH, CONFERENCE, PRINCETON, N.J., 1960 1962 Aspects of Labor Economics. Princeton Univ. Press. WALRAS, LEON (1874-1877) 1954 Elements of Pure Economics: Or, the Theory of Social Wealth. Translated by William Jaffe. Homewood, 111.: Irwin; London: Allen & Unwin. -> First published as Elements d'economie politique pure. WEINTRAUB, SIDNEY 1958 An Approach to the Theory of Income Distribution. Philadelphia: Chilton. WEINTRAUB, SIDNEY 1963 Some Aspects of Wage Theory and Policy. Philadelphia: Chilton. WICKSELL, KNUT (1893)1954 Value, Capital and Rent. New York: Rinehart. -> First published as Uber Wert, Kapital und Rente nach den neueren nationalokonomischen Theorien. WICKSTEED, PHILIP HENRY (1894) 1932 An Essay on the Co-ordination of the Laws of Distribution. Series of Reprints of Scarce Works on Political Economy, No. 12. London School of Economics and Political Science. ZEUTHEN, FREDERIK 1930 Problems of Monopoly and Economic Warfare. London: Routledge.
n STRUCTURE
Wage structure is a generic term for the set of interrelations among a collection of wage rates. It is frequently used in contrast to the concept of wage level, which refers to an average of the collection. Thus we may speak of changes in the level of wages in the United States, referring to movements in, say, the median hourly wage paid to all wage earners, as contrasted with changes in one or more wage structures, referring to movements of one wage rate relative to others. Correlative with the concept of wage structure is that of wage differential—-some measure of the difference between elements of a wage structure. In short, a wage structure is the relation among two or more
403
wages related to one another in some systematic way. Obviously, there are many wage structures that might be of interest: within a given country or region there is an occupational structure, an industrial structure, a structure by size of firms, etc. Among a set of countries or regions, wage structures are also found: for example, the average hourly earnings of factory workers in the states of the United States form a geographical wage structure. In this article only a few of the more important types of wage structure can be considered. The idea of a wage structure, although not the name, is as old as the wage concept itself; it is almost as old as intellectual concern with economic problems. However, few theoretical tools have been specifically designed to analyze wage structures. One outstanding exception is the concept of noncompeting groups, associated with the names of J. S. Mill and J. E. Cairns, which pertains primarily to occupational wage differentials. Another is the distinction between equalizing and nonequalizing wage differentials, expounded by Adam Smith. From one point of view, a wage structure is simply a kind of price structure, as are the structure of interest rates and the structure of commodity prices among, say, finished goods, semifinished goods, and raw materials. Economists are concerned with the behavior of these price structures for a variety of reasons. A change in the price of one raw material or one type of labor vis-a-vis another may alter the relative rates of production of different commodities or the terms and direction of international trade; it may also change the distribution of income among the sellers of the different commodities or services whose prices constitute the structure in question. In the following discussion, we shall mean by "wages" the average straight-time hourly earnings (during a given week) of a worker, unless the contrary is explicitly stated. Hourly earnings are not always the wage concept best suited to a particular analysis of wage structure. However, they are the most commonly used measure because of their availability. For the purpose of comparing labor costs to employers at different locations, the data wanted is average hourly employee compensation including fringe benefits. To study the intertemporal behavior of wages viewed as the "price of labor," one needs average straight-time hourly compensation (including fringe benefits) so as to abstract from the effect of varying amounts of overtime (usually paid at premium rates). Discussions of the economic welfare of different occupational groups usually refer to earnings
404
WAGES: Structure
over a lifetime rather than in a "typical" hour; for this purpose the differential impact of unemployment and length of working life are very important. Refinement of existing measures of wage structure would greatly improve present-day analysis, but this must await the slow accumulation of better statistical information. Theoretical considerations Although few economists would deny that a wage structure is one species of price structure, many contend that wage differentials are not subject to the laws of the market (sometimes called the laws of supply and demand) to the same degree as others or are not subject to them at all. To treat a wage structure as subject to these laws is to assume (1) that each of the wage elements within the structure behaves as though it were determined in a (purely) competitive market and (2) that deviations of the observed wage elements from their equilibrium values either are negligible or can be attributed to lags in the process of adjustment to departures from equilibrium. Each of these assumptions is pregnant with factual implications. The first assumption implies that labor unions and the pricing policies of firms have only a negligible influence on wage differentials; either they have no appreciable effect upon wages or they cause all wages to vary proportionately. The first assumption also implies that departures from economic rationality, or changes in the objectives of buyers and sellers of labor services, do not affect relative wages. Yet a further implication is that variations in "quality" among similar units of labor service are negligible so that the labor quantities (e.g., man hours of labor) corresponding to any element of the wage structure may be treated as different service units of the same factor of production. The second assumption implies that if the supply of any kind of labor (the quantity corresponding to an element in the structure) exceeds the demand, its wage will fall, and vice versa. This is to say that each element of the wage structure conforms to the laws of the market. Obviously the process of adjustment to a discrepancy between demand and supply takes time; the behavior of the wage during the "adjustment period" reflects the temporary effect of forces other than those of excess supply. The length of adjustment periods and the behavior of wages within them reflect the strength of "nonmarket" forces in wage determination. No one pretends that any of the intellectual constructions used in applying the laws of the
market to wage structures is descriptive of the real world. All of them, to a greater or lesser degree, simplify reality. Whether they constitute more useful simplifications than those posited by alternative theories is the important and controversial issue. Institutional factors. In the analysis of wages, as in other applications of price theory, some economists believe the best explanation of empirical phenomena is to be found by applying competitive price theory as a first approximation and then making allowance for the operation of "other forces," which are assumed to be of secondary importance. Other economists feel strongly that this approach involves a misplacing of emphasis. While the latter usually concede that market forces are one of a number of factors bearing upon wage determination, they do not believe that they always merit primacy. Instead, they stress a variety of other forces, varying in importance with time and place, that might loosely be called "institutional." Among the more important of these are (1) trade union wage policy and collective bargaining; (2) the attitudes of employers, and of the community generally, toward "wage relativities"; and (3) governmental wage policies. Let us consider each of these briefly. Trade union policy. From time to time, unions announce specific objectives of wage policy. For example, in the late 1930s and the 1940s the Swedish unions announced a "solidaristic" wage policy designed to raise the wages of the lowerpaid workers relative to those of workers (initially) better paid by adjusting the terms of collective agreements. Frequently, industrial unions in the United States ask for, say, a ten-cent per hour increase for all workers, which implies larger percentage increases for the lower-paid workers. At other times they demand equal percentage increases for all workers or even special allowances for highly paid craftsmen. Unions sometimes insist that incentive plans embody certain characteristics but in other cases resist them altogether; either position may affect the wage structure of workers employed under a union contract. The desire of each union to do as well as other unions having members in adjacent areas or doing similar work has been much emphasized by students of wages. This desire has allegedly led to "wage patterns" that exert great pressure on participants in collective bargaining to imitate the wage behavior of other bargainers within the same "orbit of coercive comparison" or on the same "wage contour." A further consequence sometimes attributed to union wage policy is the reduction of "personal dif-
WAGES: Structure ferentials"—differences in wages paid to workers apparently doing the same job. Personal differentials sometimes reflect differential effort, as employers contend, and sometimes favoritism, as unions allege. While unionism cannot eliminate such differentials, it can make it harder for the employer to distribute them arbitrarily. Employer and community attitudes. It has been observed in many countries that some employers pay more than others for the same type of work. Although the higher-paying firms tend to get the cream of the labor supply, it is often contended that this is not the sole—or even the principal—reason for a "high wage" policy. The same writers deny that achievement of better morale and higher productivity, which are associated with high wages, is the primary motivation. Rather, they argue, the social conscience of those employers who are able to pay more than the market requires frequently drives them to do so as a contribution to the well-being of their employees and the stability of the community. Sometimes the spur of conscience alone generates a high wage policy; in other cases there may be considerable social and even governmental pressure. But whatever the reason, differential sensitivity to the demands of social conscience and differential ability to respond to such demands lead to wage differentials among firms that cannot be explained entirely by the laws of the market. Governmental policies. Governmental wage policies also exert a significant influence on a nation's wage structure through a number of channels: minimum wage laws, family allowances, national wage agreements imposed by governmental pressure, the wage policies of public enterprises, social security laws, etc. The role of policy—union, employer, and governmental—in wage determination is so obvious and so prevalent that it is hard for many observers, particularly those not trained in economics, to believe that wage structure can reflect anything else. This is especially so because wage policies are often the subject of heated public controversy. Market forces, on the other hand, work anonymously and even pseudonymously, and are therefore easily overlooked. No competent economist would deny that wage policies are influenced by market pressures. However, those who emphasize the importance of the institutional arrangements and attitudes tend to regard market forces as only one among many relevant influences and to portray the basic characteristics of a wage structure as being more or less independent of considerations of cost minimization.
405
To exemplify, although exaggeratedly, the opposing views, consider an administered salary schedule such as the set of salaries for the various positions in a civil service. An extreme "institutionalist" might seek to explain the interrelations among the various salary levels solely in terms of the decisions of civil service administrators. On the other hand, an extreme "price theorist" would contend that the administrators' decisions affected only the relation of the salary scale to the various job titles. If the salary attached to a job title was lower than what the market required to obtain a person with the requisite skills, the job would tend either to go unfilled or to be improperly performed by the inadequate personnel obtainable at the civil service scale. The job's duties, although not necessarily its title, would tend to move "up the scale" to a level where the salary was adequate to attract competent personnel. The reverse process would occur, although even more slowly, if a job title were "overpriced" relative to the market. Ultimately the salaries paid to given individuals will correspond to the market's evaluation of their capacities; all that the decisions of the civil service administration can accomplish is to determine their job titles or ranks. But although the long-run tendency of market forces is in this direction, few students contend that these forces completely obliterate the effect of institutional predilections, especially those reflected in governmental policy. If a government desires wage structures with certain characteristics and persistently bends its will to achieve them, it can thwart market forces indefinitely. (If it succeeds, there will be further predictable consequences, but that is another matter.) In short, despite continuing debate over the importance of market and institutional forces in wage determination, the disagreement is primarily one of emphasis. Most students agree that institutional factors are at their best in explaining short-run variations in wage structure, while market forces become increasingly dominant in explaining longterm trends or large interregional or international differences. Occupational wage structure It is convenient to treat the occupational wage structure of a given place as the "fundamental" structure and build upon it in explaining the other structures—industrial, racial, etc. However, this is not to deny that the various wage structures are interdependent. Equalizing differentials. It is apparent to the most casual observer that individuals in certain oc-
406
WAGES: Structure
cupations typically earn more than those in others, whether earnings are measured per hour, per year, or per lifetime. One cause of such differences is that some jobs are less pleasant than others—that is, the work is more fatiguing or more hazardous, is located in unpleasant physical surroundings or an unusually inaccessible area, or has low prestige in the community. To fill occupations or jobs that are generally disfavored in the community tends to require extra compensation relative to others involving the same "degree" of skill or training. This is sometimes expressed by saying that the net advantages of jobs requiring the same degree of skill and training tend to be equal. It follows that relatively unpleasant jobs require a compensating or equalizing differential in wages to balance the nonpecuniary dissatisfactions and equalize the net advantages. Examples of equalizing wage differentials are the premiums frequently paid for working night shifts (shift differentials) and for work in unpleasant places and the common practice in job evaluation schemes of awarding points that raise wages for the unpleasantness or danger of a job. If occupational wage structures primarily reflected equalizing differentials, we would expect the most pleasant jobs to be the lowest paid. Notoriously this has not been the case. The highest-paid jobs (executive positions, the professions) also have the best working conditions and the most prestige. This is partly because persons qualifying for such jobs prefer to have part of their differential earnings paid as on-the-job comforts. Also, onthe-job amenities often appreciably enhance productivity and hence are desired by employers. In short, the differential reward of superior occupations is nonequalizing. Noncompeting groups and training costs. Why then do these differential rewards persist? Why doesn't competition eliminate them? The usual answer is that "workers" fall into noncompeting groups. The labor market for, say, nuclear physicists is quite distinct from that for janitors; no matter how high the wage of the physicist, his employer cannot substitute a janitor to reduce labor costs. This is common sense, but the economics that underlie it are not always well understood. Since the highest-paid occupations are generally filled by highly educated persons, it is often asserted that doctors and lawyers "deserve" high incomes because of the time and expense incurred in their training. However, whatever their deserts, generations of highly educated but impecunious students of the classics, dead languages, etc., bear witness that education of itself is no guarantee of
material prosperity. In order for an occupation to yield a high income to its typical practitioner, there must be an effective demand for its practice. The costs of training, in time, trouble, and money, do affect the income from an occupation, but only indirectly by acting as a check to the supply of practitioners. If the net advantages, including earnings, of any occupation fall below those of others requiring the same degree of training and natural ability, it will cease to attract its current share of new recruits. This will lead to a relative decline in the number of its practitioners that will persist until net advantages equalize or the occupation becomes extinct. This tendency exercises a powerful restraint upon divergence among average earnings in different but competitive occupations. However, it is a slow-acting restraint that permits sharp fluctuations in relative earnings for substantial periods of time; its full power can be observed only over fairly long periods, say, 15-25 years. During periods of "temporary" disturbance, wage earners in the unfavored occupations tend to suffer unemployment as well as relatively declining hourly wages. The preceding remarks suggest that the wellpaid occupations require relatively much training and education. Conceptually, it is possible to assign a money value to the various cost elements of training for a "typical" practitioner of an occupation (e.g., tuition, cost of books, foregone earnings). This value may be termed the investment necessary for producing a typical member of an occupation, that is, his long-run supply price. From this point of view, nonequalizing differences in earnings among occupations reflect unequal returns to given amounts of investment in training. This approach has recently attracted much interest among economists, but there has not yet been sufficient empirical research to appraise its effectiveness in explaining occupational wage differences. But no matter how well differential investment explains (nonequalizing) differences in occupational earnings, it should not be forgotten that the capital market for investment in human capacities is extremely "imperfect." It is very much easier for some prospective trainees for a (relatively) "capital intensive" occupation to obtain the necessary funds, through loam or gifts, than for others. The favored individuals a^3 those whose families or friends can either provide the capital themselves or induce others to do so. The importance of personal connections has tended to decline in Western countries as government and institutionally supported scholarships and loans have become more readily available. However, these are still largely
WAGES: Structure confined to the more able students. Among the mediocre, the children of well-to-do parents retain a substantial advantage in seeking training. Moreover, the children of well-educated parents are generally more successful in academic pursuits, which gives them a great advantage in "open" competition for scholarships and other sources of assistance. The children of relatively uneducated persons labor under a substantial handicap in academic competition with the offspring of those better schooled; that is, they are less desirable "sites" for investment. The relative level of earnings in an occupation is normally independent of the state of relative demand in the long run. However, even in the long run it is possible for the level of demand to affect relative occupational earnings, if taste for engaging in a particular occupation or native capacity for doing so is distributed very unevenly among the population so that the long-run supply price for the occupation increases with the relative number of practitioners. For example, the relative earnings of concert violinists of virtuoso quality might be an increasing function of the demand (at given prices) for live performances. But, except for unusual and narrowly defined occupations, this is a factor of secondary importance in the long run, although not in the short. During comparatively short time periods within which prior commitments inhibit interoccupational movement, net advantages of particular occupations vary sharply with the state of current demand. In these short periods, cost of training plays but a minor role in affecting the interoccupational wage structure. Union and governmental policies. The above remarks follow the tradition of neoclassical price theory in stressing market forces as explanatory factors for occupational wage structures. However, relative occupational earnings reflect more than the laws of supply and demand. Union behavior is often considered important in determining relative occupational net advantages. Occupations in which there are strong unions may enjoy high wages because the unions set wages above "competitive levels" and protect them by restricting labor supply. This can—and does—happen. However, the ability of a union to control labor supply and maintain wages above the competitive level is strongly conditioned by the state of the labor market itself. It is debatable whether the independent impact of unions (the effect separate from the correlation of unionism with favorable market conditions) upon occupational wage differences is a major determinant of occupational wage structure. To some extent, a similar comment applies to
407
the ability of governments to affect relative occupational wages. The ability of governments to maintain their control of wage rates, and the conditions both of labor supply and demand, gives them much greater power over wage structures than any union. However, it is not always possible to separate the impact of governmental and union policies. In some countries collective agreements negotiated by unions are "extended" by law to apply to all firms within an industry, unionized or not. But in most cases it is the power of the government rather than the bargaining strength of the union that is the major source of resistance to market forces. Skill differentials. Most statistics pertaining to occupational wage differentials refer to "skill differentials"—the difference between the straighttime hourly wages paid to common manual labor and those paid to skilled manual workers, such as electricians and machinists. The definition of "common labor" must be culturally specific; what is a common "skill" in an advanced society (e.g., ability to drive a small truck) may be a special skill in a more primitive one. The concept of skill and its measurement are not in a satisfactory state, but the theoretical problems involved are too intricate for a brief discussion. If we select two occupations to mirror skill differentials, they will exhibit a kind of "life cycle." At the "birth" of the special skill (when it first comes into demand) it will be scarce and its practioners correspondingly highly paid relative both to common labor and to other skilled jobs. These high rewards will attract trainees who will eventually bring down the earnings to the general level of skilled workers. In time, technical progress will make the skill obsolete, and its earnings will fall below the general level attained by comparably skilled workers, so that the number of practitioners will tend to decline. Secular trends. The hypothesis of a life cycle in specific skill differentials provides one possible explanation for a secular movement in skill differentials generally. Suppose that communities in early stages of economic growth tend to have many occupations in the early phases of these life cycles, and conversely for advanced economies. Then, as an economy ages, relative weight would shift from "young" to "mature" skills, reducing the average of all skill differentials. However, it is as yet unknown whether there is any relation between the stage of an economy's development and the life cycle phase of its "typical" skill differential. A different explanation of secularly declining skill margins stresses the trend toward equality of opportunity for occupational training and general
408
WAGES: Structure
education in advanced countries. A century ago skilled workers were markedly different from unskilled workers in training, in literacy, and sometimes in race or ethnic origin. Abilities and opportunities for "picking up" skills on the job or through after-work training were more limited than now, and consequently the possibility of substituting less for more skilled workers was less than at present. The situation in contemporary underdeveloped countries suggests that in labor force structure "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." The trend toward greater similarity of education, at least among manual workers, is not the only factor working to reduce the. margin for skill. The limitations or prohibition on the use of child labor and of manual labor by females have also reduced the supply of relatively cheap substitutes for adult males in manual occupations. This has tended to eliminate from the labor force the least productive and poorest-paid group of unskilled workers, thereby increasing the wages of their close competitors (unskilled adult males) relative to those of the more skilled. In the United States the restriction of immigration in the early 1920s also reduced the supply of unskilled labor relative to skilled. Minimum-wage laws have also tended to narrow skill margins secularly within the sector of the economy to which they apply because they apply mainly to unskilled, low-wage jobs. Their differential effect may sometimes be offset by the pressure of unions, which is generally more effective in the skilled trades; however, this is debatable. It must be noted that the scope of legislation establishing minimum wages, maximum hours, and the like is usually confined to the "industrial" sector of an economy and to employers who hire more than a prescribed number of employees. Such laws usually do not apply to agriculture or small business— especially retail trade. The tendency for skill margins to contract secularly is probably most marked in those sectors of the economy where minimum-wage and related labor standards are effectively enforced. This is because in retail trade and service, agriculture, etc., especially where self-employed and family workers predominate, there are opportunities for substituting low-wage females and juveniles that cannot (because of legislation or social custom) be utilized elsewhere. Available evidence is certainly not inconsistent with this statement. However, the paucity and poor quality of the data make it imprudent to go beyond saying that the secular tendency for skill margins to decline is less clearly observed in that part of the economy excluded
from effective coverage of minimum-wage regulation than elsewhere. The long-run decline in the skill margin in advanced countries has not occurred slowly and steadily. Instead, the skill margin appears to have remained constant for relatively long periods of time and then to have declined sharply within a very few years. These sharp declines have occurred mainly during periods of extreme labor shortage, especially during World War i and World War n. During major depressions, when there was much unemployment, widening of skill margins has sometimes been observed, but there are notable exceptions. For example, there does not appear to have been much, if any, widening of skill margins during the great depression of the early 1930s. (See Table 1.) The observed skill margin is not responsive to minor variations in business activity. Table 7 — Earnings of skilled workers as percentage of earnings of unskilled in the United States, 1907-7947 Median per cent
Interquartile range of percentages
205 175 180 165 155
180-280 150-225 160-220 150-190 145-170
200 165 175 155
175-245 150-235 155-215 145-175
215 195 190 170
1 95-235 175-230 165-235 150-195
190 175 170 145
1 70-250 1 45-235 150-215 140-165
185 170 160 145
165-200 1 60-1 95 145-170 140-165
All United States 1907
1918-1919 1931-1932 1937-1940 1945-1947 Northeast 1907
1918-1919 1931-1932 1945-1947 South 1907
1918-1919 1931-1932 1945-1947 Middle West 1907
1918-1919 1931-1932 1945-1947 Far West 1907
1918-1919 1931-1932 1 945-1 947
Source: Based on Ober 1948.
International comparisons. Among manual workers, in the early 1960s, the margin for skill was a little greater in the United States than in most countries of western Europe and the British Commonwealth; in the United States the ratio of skilled to unskilled hourly earnings was about 4 to 3, as compared with about 5 to 4 in other developed
WAGES: Structure
409
Table 2a — Ratios of wage rates of unskilled workers to those of skilled workers (males), October 1938 and October 7962, various countries (rate of skilled workers = 100)
RATE'
Printing and publishing: ratio to machine compositors
Manufacture of machinery: ratio to iron molders
7938
1938
1962
Electric light and power: ratio to electrical fitters
Consfrucr;on; ratio to bricklayers
7962
1938
1962
1938
7962
50 57 67
62 80 73
54
67C
72
75
95 80 85 76 95 84 89
83 — 69 95 88 87 76
73 87 80 88 87 80f 83
85 86
72 85
72 88
America: Canadab
63 80
59
73d 80
81 76 76 77 88
89 78 81 85 90
United States (New York)
34
Argentina (Buenos Aires) Europe:
Sweden (Stockholm)
87
85 77 78 87
Switzerland (Zurich)
43 74
70 82
75
81
80 74 72 92 91 80 75
71 74
75 80
89 88
78 81
67 81
Belgium (Brussels)
III IV IV
Denmark (Copenhagen) Ireland (Dublin) Netherlands0 (Amsterdam)
United Kingdom (London)
58 73 62 74
Oceania: Australia (Melbourne) New Zealand (Wellington)
a. I—average rates, II—minimum rates, III—average earnings, IV—prevailing rates. b. 1938 applies to Ottawa only; 1962 is for the whole country. c. October 1961. d. Straight-time earnings of unskilled to fitters rather than to iron molders. e. 1962 applies to "Class I areas" only. f. Maximum rates. Source: Giinter 1964, table VI, p. 142.
Table 2b — France: ratios of rates of pay actually applied in Paris, 1948-1962 (rate of averagely skilled workers = 100) 7948
7950
7953
7956
7959
7960
7967
1962
72 78 87
118
73 79 88 120
73 79 87 123
73 78 87 123
72 77 85 119
72 77 86 119
72 77 85 119
72 77 85 119
76 81
77 82
78 82
80 84
75 79 86
75 80 87
75 79 87
73 79 86
Males: Common laborers Specialized laborers Semiskilled workers Highly skilled workers Females: Common laborers Specialized laborers Semiskilled workers
Source: Giinter 1964, table VI, p. 142.
economies (see Tables 2a-2d for data on some of the other developed economies). Within the United States the skill margin was highest in the South and lowest on the Pacific Coast; this partially reflects racial and city-size differentials (see Table 3 for other regional comparisons). The ranking of specific occupations would appear from scanty data to be similar among advanced countries. In underdeveloped countries skill margins are generally wider than in the more advanced countries. This can be explained, at least roughly, on the hypothesis that as of 1960, labor supply conditions in underdeveloped economies were similar to those in now advanced countries fifty to one hundred years earlier. However, skill margins show
extensive variation from one underdeveloped area to another, and occasionally appear to be quite small. Where this is the case, the data usually refer to a small sector of the economy where minimum-wage and related standards are enforced; Table 2c — Italy: ratios of collectively agreed rates* of male wage earners in industry, 1938—1962 (rate of averagely skilled workers ~ 100) Unskilled Semiskilled Highly skilled
7938
7957
7952
7953-7957
7958-7967
7962
78 89 121
81 94 111
89 95 112
90 95 112
91 95 113
93 96 115
Without family allowances. Source: Gunter 1964, table VI, p. 142.
410
WAGES: Structure Table 2d — Federal Republic of Germany: ratios of hourly gross earnings in manufacturing, mining, and construction, 1950—1962 (rate of averagely skilled workers = 100) 1950
1951
1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962
79 93
79 93
79 93
79 93
79 94
80 94
81 94
80 94
80 92
81 92
81 93
81 93
81 93
87 _
88 —
89 —
88 _
88 _
90 _
90 _
88 96
88 96
88 95
87 95
88 95
88 95
Males: Unskilled Semiskilled Females: Unskilled Semiskilled
Source: Giinter 1964, table VI, p. 142.
between the wages paid the unskilled workers within this "protected" sector and the earnings of the much larger number of comparable workers in agriculture, peddling, and odd jobs—the "disguised unemployed"—there is a huge gap. White-collar and professional workers. The above remarks on skill differentials refer to the difference in earnings among manual workers. Differences in earnings among white-collar and professional workers are subject to similar forces, but their manifestations differ. Earnings data for these occupations are much less plentiful than for manual workers and refer mainly to the period since 1939. These data do not show a marked decline in the relative earnings of nonsalaried professionals (in the United States) from 1939 to the early 1950s. Nor has the relative advantage (in terms of annual income) associated with more education shown an unambiguous reduction since 1939. However, there are so many problems, both of fact and interpretation, in the literature relating income differences to education that it is necessary to reserve judgment on its findings. Color and sex differentials. One aspect of occupational wage structures that has attracted much Table 3 — Average hourly earnings of skilled workers as percentage of average for unskilled in metropolitan areas of the United States, 1961-1962 Per cent All United States Manufacturing
139
Nonmanufacturing
164
Northeast Manufacturing
140
Nonmanufacturing
148
South Manufacturing Nonmanufacturing
148 193
North Central Manufacturing
136
Nonmanufacturing
163
West Manufacturing
139
Nonmanufacturing
155
Source: Based on "Occupational Wage Relationships . . ." 1963.
attention is the association of occupation with other social characteristics. For example, Negroes are disproportionately represented in the lowpaying and otherwise undesirable occupations. In part, this is because of their fewer years of schooling, but it also reflects discrimination against them in the labor market. Even within given occupations Negroes earn less than whites, and their relative income disadvantage appears to be greater within those occupations requiring extensive schooling. [See DISCRIMINATION, ECONOMIC.] The labor market role of women is somewhat analogous to that of Negroes and other unfavored groups. Certain characteristics generally ascribed to them mark them as labor market inferiors. As in the case of Negroes, the ascription involves a combination of superstition and fact that inhibits rational use of female productive capacity. Women are clearly discriminated against as candidates for positions in which they give orders to men and sometimes in jobs where they must directly compete with men. Situations in which women are paid less than men for doing the same job are the targets of legislation and trade union demands for "equal pay for equal work." However, the most important reason for the relatively low earnings of women is their virtual absence from certain industries and occupations and their concentration in others. The sectors where women are concentrated typically pay relatively low wages—for example, garment and textile manufacturing, sales work in retail stores, stenographic and related clerical jobs, and elementary-school teaching. Whether the low wages paid in these sectors reflect labor market discrimination against women within those sectors is not clear. The fact that women are able to fill these jobs increases the supply of persons available for them. Conversely, there are many jobs in heavy industry (e.g., those requiring great physical strength) that women cannot fill. Hence, the limited range of factory jobs for which women are suited tends to lower the supply price and worsen the terms of employment
WAGES: Structure
411
Table 4a — Wage differentials by size of manufacturing establishment in seven developed countries (wage rates of largest establishment = 100) Number of persons employed 1-4
Belgium 7960 _
France I960
86 93 94
50-99 100-199 200-499
)
500-999 1,000 and over
100
— _ — — 85 87 92 92 100
—
— —
— _
20-49
Italy 7960
—
—
_
5-9 10-19
Germany (Federal Republic) I960
—
—
—
78 81 81 89 100
91 94 99 99 100
Netherlands 7960 _
United Kingdom* 7954
United States" 7954
—
58 69 74 77 80 82" 84" 89 100
—
—
—
80' 8V 82 83 85 90 100
—
87 81 85 ) , 100
a. The first two size classes shown are, however, 11-24 and 25-49 persons. b. The size classes between 100 and 500 are, however, 100-249 and, 250-499 persons. Source: Taira 1966, p. 285.
on those jobs for which they can qualify. This accounts for much, but not all, of the observed inferiority of women as wage earners. However, it is likely that because the supply price of female labor is lower than that of male labor, employers tend to define job titles and duties so as to create special low-paid "female" jobs. Sometimes this involves unequal pay for equal work, which is labor market "discrimination"; but there is no reliable information as to the relative importance of the discriminatory component of sexual wage differentials. Size of firm differentials. Students generally agree that large firms, except when they are unprofitable, tend to pay higher wages on what seems to be the same job. This aspect of wage structure has been observed in several countries, particularly the United States and Japan (see Tables 4a and 4fr). It is likely that firms paying high wages obtain superior personnel, but some writers contend that this is not the main reason why they do so. It has been suggested that labor union and/or governTable 4b — Wage differentials by size of manufacturing establishment in five developing countries (wage rates of largest establishment = 100) Number of persons employed
1-4 5-9 10-19 20-49 50-99 100-199 200-499 500-999 1,000 and over
India 1955
Japan 1954
Nigeria
Pafcisfan
United Arab Republic 1961
43
47 51 55 72 85 88 100
48 49 52 57
64 74 87 100
75 83 67 J73 100
58 76 89 96
100
— —
— 65
I"
) j 100
Source: Ta ra 1966, p. 285.
mental pressure forces large firms to share their profits with their workers. However, this contention is plausible only where large firms are unusually profitable. It also has been suggested that large firms must pay higher wages in order to attract persons from a larger geographical area, that is, to offset the inconvenience of a longer journey to work. The interpretation of wage differentials within occupations among firms in a given industry is at present a disputed issue. Geographical differentials. One reason why wages differ from place to place is that the occupational composition of the labor force varies. Another is that the industrial composition or sexual or racial mixes of the labor forces differ. Thus, differences in earnings per worker among nations, regions, states, etc., should not be interpreted as necessarily reflecting different prices for the same productive service. But "pure" geographical differentials probably do exist, and the following remarks refer to them. For concreteness, define a "pure" geographical differential as a difference in average straight-time hourly compensation between two places in the same industry and occupation for a person of the same age, sex, race, and union status. A pure geographical wage differential might arise because in one country, state, or city, A, the supply of capital and other complementary factors was greater than in another, B. This would tend to make the marginal productivity, and the wage, higher in A. But, migration costs ignored, this difference could persist only if the workers in B refused to move to A or if A refused to accept them. One would not expect such a difference to persist if A and B were within the same country or within an area of free migration, except where the differential is of an equalizing nature. For example, an equalizing
412
WAGES: Structure
geographical differential (for comparable work) would arise where wages were lower in A than in B because A had a less pleasant climate. Price theory implies that any pure, nonequalizing, geographical differentials are caused by barriers to migration or are purely temporary. Temporary differentials may arise because of different conditions of labor demand in different places. If there is a pure, nonequalizing differential between A and B, favoring A, labor will move from B to A, other things being equal. But because human migration is a slow process, the differential may persist for a long time. Thus, within the United States there have been long-standing earnings differentials in favor of the Pacific Coast and adverse to the Southern states vis-a-vis the rest of the nation. These differentials have been reduced by net migration to the Pacific Coast and away from the South. However, because of birth-rate differentials and related factors, these geographical differentials still exist. (Certainly, not all of the measured geographical differential is "pure," but part of it probably is.) One species of geographical differential is the city-size differential. Money wages are higher in large than in small cities, except for the very largest cities, and in small cities than on farms. In part, such money wage differences offset differences in living costs, and, to a large extent, they also reflect differences in occupational structure. However, it seems very likely that there is a pure city-size differential. Industry differentials. Competitive price theory implies that in the long run all industries will pay the same wage to workers in a given occupation in a given location, except for those differentials necessary to equalize net advantages. This means that interindustry wage differences should reflect only differences in the occupational mix and equalizing differences on account of location. Unquestionably differences in occupation and location are a major source of existing industry differentials. In general, the high-wage industries in manufacturing require physical strength and some mechanical aptitude and hence employ relatively few women. They are typically in "heavy" industry, where firms are relatively large, and tend to be located in large cities. Thus, automobile and steel manufacturing are high-wage industries, while textiles and garment manufacturing are low-wage industries. (See Table 5.) These statements apply to the long run. At any given date, rapidly expanding industries will tend to create temporary shortages in those occupations
Table 5 — Average hourly earnings in United States industry, 7939, 7948, and 7964 (in dollars) All manufacturing
1939 1948 1964
.627 1.328 2.53
Durable goods
1939 1948 1964
.691 1.395 2.71
Nondurable goods
1939 1948 1964
.571 1.250 2.29
Bituminous coal mines
1939 1948 1964
.886 1.898 3.30
Class I steam railroad
1939 1948 1964
.714 1.309 2.80
Building construction
1939 1948 1964
.932 1.848 3.43
Wholesale trade
1939 1948 1964
.715 1.359 2.52
Retail trade
1939 1948 1964
.542 1.088 1.75
Electric light and power
1939 1948 1964
.869 1.469 3.09
Motor vehicles
1939 1948 1964
.915 1.611 3.21
Basic steel
1939 1948 1964
.845 1.591 3.36
Textiles
1939 1948 1964
—
1.49 1.79
Apparel
1939 1948 1964
—
1.220 1.79
Sources.- U.S. Department of Commerce 1960, pp. 92-94; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 1966, pp. 109, 250, 362, 387, and 388.
and locations on whose labor supply they draw heavily. This will tend to make their wage rates higher than those paid in other industries. Consequently, "new" industries tend to pay higher wages than the "average," other things being equal, and old ones to pay less.
WAGES: Structure This interpretation of the interindustry wage structure is disputed by economists who contend that monopoly power in the product market gives certain industries the ability to pay more for their labor and that union and governmental pressure forces these gains to be shared with employees. This view is prevalent among economists and policy makers who are concerned with the possible inflationary effects of "key bargains" between large firms and big unions. It is likely that at any given time an industry's current profit position and the strength of the unions with which it deals do affect the movement in its wage level relative to that in other industries. But it is not so clear that these forces can appreciably influence relative wage levels for any prolonged period. They could do so in principle, but there is little or no uncontroverted evidence that they have done so in fact. Since 1965 there has been a great increase in knowledge of the separate effects of such variables as industry, city size, skill level, education, race, and sex on hourly wages in the United States. This is due to the availability of details on individuals obtainable from the l-in-1,000 sample of the 1960 census. These data have already been utilized in separate studies by Fuchs (1967) and by Weiss (1966). Further studies on these and similar data are currently in progress, and within a decade there should be a great increase both in our knowledge of the details of wage structure and our understanding of their interrelationships. Thus far, the discussion in this article has referred primarily to the industrialized sector of the economy. Agriculture, in all countries, stands at or near the bottom of the interindustry wage hierarchy. In part, this is because of the large amount of common labor in its input mix. But it is also due to the fact that as a result of relatively high birth rates and a low income elasticity of demand for foodstuffs, rural areas are net exporters of labor. Most economies are in a state of lagging adjustment to a disequilibrium between the net advantages of rural and urban employment, and agriculture is located so as to take advantage of the relatively low-wage rural labor market. Other industries, particularly food processing, that can be efficiently carried on in small towns and rural areas similarly benefit from this locational advantage. Small towns, small firms, contact with agriculture, employment of females and youths, and impermanent employment relations are part of a low-wage syndrome. Low-wage industries tend to
413
exhibit these characteristics more than others. Not surprisingly, such industries usually lie outside the mesh of statutory minimum-wage requirements, and their workers are less prone to be unionized than the labor force as a whole. MELVIN W. REDER BIBLIOGRAPHY BECKER, GARY S. 1957 Economics of Discrimination. Univ. of Chicago Press. BECKER, GARY S. 1964 Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis With Special Reference to Education. New York: National Bureau of Economic Research. BROWN, E. H. PHELPS 1962 The Economics of Labor. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. -> See especially Chapter 5. BROWN, E. H. PHELPS; and BROWNE, M. H. 1962 Earnings in Industries of the United Kingdom: 1948-1959. Economic Journal 72:517-549. DUNLOP, JOHN T. (editor) (1957) 1959 The Theory of Wage Determination. New York: St. Martins. -> See especially Part 4. FUCHS, VICTOR R. 1967 Differentials in Hourly Earnings by Region and City Size, 1959. New York: National Bureau of Economic Research. GILMAN, HARRY J. 1965 Economic Discrimination and Unemployment. American Economic Review 55:10771096. GUNTER, H. 1964 Changes in Occupational Wage Differentials. International Labour Review 89:136-155. KEAT, PAUL S. 1960 Long-run Changes in Occupational Wage Structure: 1900-1956. Journal of Political Economy 68:584-600. KENDRICK, JOHN W. 1961 Productivity Trends in the United States. National Bureau of Economic Research, General Series, No. 71. Princeton Univ. Press. KERR, CLARK 1954 The Balkanization of Labor Markets. Pages 92-110 in Labor Mobility and Economic Opportunity: Essays, by E. Wight Bakke et al. New York: Wiley. LEBERGOTT, STANLEY 1947 Wage Structures. Review of Economic Statistics 29:274-285. LEWIS, W. ARTHUR 1954 Economic Development With Unlimited Supplies of Labor. Manchester School of Economic and Social Studies 22:139-191. MILLER, HERMAN P. 1966 Income Distribution in the United States. 1960 Census Monograph Series. Washington: Government Printing Office. -» See especially Chapter 6. OBER, HARRY 1948 Occupational Wage Differentials: 1907-1947. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Monthly Labor Review 67:127-134. Occupational Wage Relationships in Metropolitan Areas: 1961-1962. 1963 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Monthly Labor Review 86:1426-1431. REDER, MELVIN W. 1955 The Theory of Occupational Wage Differentials. American Economic Review 45:833-852. REDER, MELVIN W. 1962 Wage Differentials: Theory and Measurement. Pages 257-317 in UniversitiesNational Bureau Committee for Economic Research, Conference, Princeton, N.J., 1960, Aspects of Labor Economics. Princeton Univ. Press. -» Contains six pages of comment by Donald E. Cullen.
414
WAGES: Systems of Payment
REYNOLDS, LLOYD G.- and TAFT, CYNTHIA H. 1956 The Evolution of Wage Structure. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. SCHULTZ, THEODORE W. (editor) 1962 Investment in Human Beings. Journal of Political Economy 70 (Supplement), no. 5, part 2. -> Papers presented at a conference called by the Universities-National Bureau Committee for Economic Research. TAIRA, KOJI 1966 Wage Differentials in Developing Countries: A Survey of Findings. International Labour Review 93:281-301. U.S. BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS 1966 Employment and Earnings Statistics for United States 1909-1965. Washington: Government Printing Office. U.S. DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE, BUREAU OF THE CENSUS 1960 Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1957. Washington: Government Printing Office. WEISS, L. W. 1966 Concentration and Labor Earnings. American Economic Review 56:96-117. WOODS, H. D.; and OSTRY, SYLVIA 1963 Labour Policy and Labour Economics in Canada. New York: St. Martins. WOOTTON, BARBARA (ADAM) 1955 Social Foundations of Wage Policy: A Study of Contemporary British Wage and Salary Structure. New York: Norton. WOYTINSKY, WLADIMIR S. 1953 Employment and Wages in the United States. New York: Twentieth Century Fund. -» See especially Part 4. Ill SYSTEMS OF PAYMENT
A system of wage payment prescribes a method for both measuring achievement and allocating rewards. Existing systems of wage payment present important variations and alternatives: achievement can be denned as extra output (piecework), as cost reduction (Scanlon Plan), as profit improvement (profit sharing), or as meeting predetermined norms (measured day work). Similarly, rewards can be allocated to individuals on a daily basis (piecework), to plant-wide groups on a monthly basis (Scanlon Plan), to company-wide groups in deferred compensation at yearly intervals (profit sharing), or to employees on a time basis without direct reference to output (measured daywork). Four systems have been chosen for analysis— they range between those relying primarily on direct financial inducements, as in output incentives, and those using nonfinancial techniques for motivating employees, as in measured daywork. Cost reduction and profit sharing fall somewhere in between. Output incentives. The use of output incentives dates back to the beginning of the factory system. Prices were established for component operations, and the worker was paid on the basis of his output. For example, in the early days of the steel industry, the foreman acted as a subcontractor
and the piecework price served as the method of reimbursement. In many industries, payment by output has become highly developed. These are the so-called piecework industries, such as men's and women's apparel, hosiery, and shoes. In these industries the grade system has developed, wherein the price of the finished product determines the value of the labor content. Piecework incentives help to standardize unit labor costs in these highly competitive industries. Except for the piecework industries, most output incentives today are of the standard-hour variety. Production standards are established by industrial engineering analysis. Much of the work measurement is done by actual time study, although the use of predetermined and standard data is gaining in popularity. In the United States, output incentives cover about 30 per cent of the production and maintenance work force (Lewis 1960). The extent of coverage for other countries runs higher: in England, over 40 per cent (Robertson 1960, p. 92); in much of Europe, about 50-60 per cent (Guilbert I960); in Scandinavia about 75 per cent (Sellie 1961, p. 18); in the U.S.S.R. about 75 per cent (Campbell 1960, p. 136); in Communist China the vast majority of workers are paid on this basis (Hoffmann 1964, p. 96). The industries using output incentives are distinguished by several characteristics (McKersie et al. 1964; Guilbert 1960). (1) Labor costs represent a high percentage of the value added by manufacture. For example, the cigarette industry has a labor cost factor of 12 per cent and incentive coverage of only 3 per cent, while the footwear industry has a labor cost factor of 50 per cent and incentive coverage of 71 per cent. (2) The plant is characterized by a low state of technology. For example, the hardware industry is characterized by considerable handwork and has an incentive coverage of 44 per cent, while the canning industry is highly mechanized and has an incentive coverage of only 12 per cent. In a study of the steel industry in Europe, it was found that the portion of remuneration related to output declined as the state of technology increased (Lutz & Willener 1960). Interestingly, the steel industry in the United States continues to use output incentives in the presence of advanced technology. The purpose of these incentives, however, is to emphasize equipment utilization rather than output per se.
WAGES: Systems of Payment (3) The plant is reasonably large. Very small establishments are not able to apply industrial engineering techniques of standardization and work measurement. Also, the span of control of the entire operation is usually within the limits of the owner's capabilities, and the workers can be motivated on an individual basis. For example, bakeries, which average 28 employees per establishment, use output incentives for only 5 per cent of the work force. In larger establishments it becomes necessary and feasible to install output incentives. (4) Other motivational devices are not available. For example, output incentives are used more frequently in industries characterized by high layoff rates and by female employment. When job tenure is short, it is not possible to appeal to employees with other rewards, such as pension plans, promotions, year-end bonuses, etc. Consequently, it is necessary to elicit performance with the direct stimulus of an output incentive. The main advantage of output incentives is that they can elicit substantial motivation, since they are direct in nature and are applied to the individual or small group. Because of this "pull," a company may need fewer foremen, and less discipline may be necessary. However, output incentives produce many problems. These difficulties have been well analyzed by a number of English writers (Baldamus 1961; Behrend 1957; Marriott 1957; Shimmin 1959). In the massive study of collective bargaining in the United States (Slichter et al. 1960), many output schemes were characterized as demoralized: low effort, unduly high earnings, inequitable relationships between effort and earnings, and considerable allowance payments. While demoralization sometimes is the fault of management, quite often it stems from the inherent nature of the system itself. Output incentives teach people to beat the system, rather than to work more efficiently. People are constantly on guard against unwanted fluctuations in their take-home pay, and they press for special arrangements to handle nonstandard situations. At the same time, production standards gradually loosen as creeping changes occur. As a result, the system slowly but steadily deteriorates. One survey showed that only 22 per cent of the output plans that had been put into operation during the preceding 15 years were still functioning as originally conceived (Payne 1951, p. 23). Unions have played some part in this deterioration process. If a union is so inclined, it can challenge production standards and force management
415
to loosen them; it can rally worker support for a program of restricting output; and it can demand that various allowance rules be incorporated into the labor agreement. Evaluating the net result of output incentives is a difficult matter. Many claims have been made about the dramatic improvement that has taken place in output and unit labor costs after the installation of output incentives. However, one suspects that much of the improvement has come from the industrial engineering work that precedes the incentive application, rather than from the incentive itself (Belcher 1960, p. 98). Cost-reduction plans. The cost-reduction approach received considerable attention in the United States after the negotiation of the Kaiser Plan in 1962. The plan distributes savings in labor and material costs between the employees and the company, roughly on a one-third-two-thirds basis. The plan also reckons with technological change by sharing the benefits from the introduction of capital in the same ratio as efficiency improvements and by guaranteeing that no one will lose employment because of mechanization (or because of the operation of the plan). The Scanlon Plan is the best-known example of the cost-reduction approach. Since its inception in 1947, the Scanlon Plan has been installed in several dozen firms. The Rucker Share of Production Plan is another well-known system. It has been installed in about fifty or sixty firms. The importance of these cost-reduction plans is not in the number of actual installations but in the attention which they have commanded. In common they seek to motivate employees to submit ideas for increasing efficiency and reducing costs. The plans (particularly the Kaiser and Scanlon plans) place considerable emphasis on involving union representatives and employees in solving the key problems of the business. To this end, management makes available considerable information. Where have these cost-reduction plans been used? In some instances they have emerged as solutions to financial crises (Lesieur 1958, p. 102). There is also some suggestion that these plans have been used more frequently in closely held companies. A family-held business may be less hesitant to enter into an arrangement wherein employees can earn a bonus while, at the same time, the firm can be losing money. The cost-reduction approach contains a number of important advantages. It focuses attention on costs rather than just on output. In many industries output is limited by technology; hence this ap-
416
WAGES: Systems of Payment
proach appropriately directs attention to the areas of the business where achievement is possible. The Kaiser Plan also focuses attention on reducing nonlabor costs—this emphasis encourages employees to improve efficiency without working themselves out of employment. The plans emphasize coordination and teamwork, not just on the factory floor but between all elements of the organization. Significantly, the Scanlon Plan includes indirect as well as direct employees, and the Kaiser Plan includes office employees. But the cost-reduction approach also contains some weaknesses. It ties a company to a historical norm which may not reflect the competitive exigencies of the future. It is also possible to pay rewards on a continuing basis for improvements that should be viewed as "one-shot." On balance, it appears that cost reduction plans have worked reasonably well. During the first year of the Kaiser Plan, employees generated bonuses equal to 45 cents per hour. About one thousand suggestions were submitted, most of which were put into practice. Most of the Scanlon installations have remained in force, although there have been several abandonments (Gilson & Lefcowitz 1957). In the Scanlon installations, bonus earnings have averaged between 10 and 15 per cent of base pay and an important qualitative gain has come from the improvement in employee relations. Profit-sharing plans. Profit sharing has been growing rapidly in the United States. The Council of Profit Sharing Industries has estimated that the number of installations grew from about nine thousand in 1950 to about 34,000 in 1960. Deferred plans have grown more rapidly than cash plans: deferred plans accounted for 24,000 installations in 1960, while cash plans outnumbered deferred plans in 1950 ("Profit Sharing Push" 1961). Profit sharing has been used with success in Europe. The coverage, however, does not appear to be as extensive as in the United States. Usually profit sharing covers all employees in a company with the exception of a few top executives, who may be covered by a separate plan. The use of bonus plans for top executives appears to be quite extensive: at least 50 per cent of the companies use them (Belcher 1960, p. 108). Patton observes that the industries which frequently use executive bonus plans (appliances, automotive, retail, and textile) tend to be divisionalized and tend to be industries where profits are influenced more by the quality of executive performance than by the ups and downs of the business cycle (Patton 1961, pp. 136-137).
The recent growth in profit sharing has been due to the good business conditions which have prevailed during the postwar period. Contrastingly, profit sharing passed from the scene during the great depression of the 1930s, this falloff following a period of heavy use during the prosperous 1920s. The relative growth of the deferred plans stems from the favorable income tax status accorded monies set aside under profit sharing. Profit sharing appears to be more prevalent in medium-sized companies. In such establishments the worker is in a better position to observe the relationship between extra effort and extra earnings (National Industrial Conference Board 1957, p. 61). Profit sharing has some important advantages. Companies claim that it fosters economic education because people who are directly affected by the profits of a business come to learn something about the forces of the free enterprise system. Another important advantage is that profit sharing only shares rewards when they can be afforded. But profit sharing contains a major weakness. Since profits are influenced by a wide range of forces, many of which are beyond the control of the people in the organization, people can work more industriously and receive no rewards for this. Most companies report favorable results with profit sharing (Belcher [1955] 1962, p. 452; National Industrial Conference Board 1957). Rewards average between 10 and 15 per cent of base compensation. Quite importantly, companies also point to improvement in employee attitudes. Measured daywork. Under measured daywork, the worker receives time wages yet management establishes—and in varying degrees discloses and enforces—production standards. While there is little statistical proof, many people feel that this form of wage payment has been growing (Marriott 1957, pp. 194, 195). The increased use of measured daywork probably reflects a greater use of industrial engineering techniques in plants that have traditionally paid time wages, rather than a major changeover from output incentives. Measured daywork is most frequently used in large companies, where worker performance can be monitored through control techniques and sophisticated administration. This probably explains the greater use of measured daywork (and the more limited use of output incentives) in the United States than in other countries. To the extent that management in the United States can elicit employee effort through skilled supervision and advanced control techniques, direct incentives may
WAGES: Systems of Payment not be as necessary as in other countries, where the industrial revolution has not proceeded as far. Measured daywork is also being used for mechanized operations, where employees are required to work at the pace of the conveyor line or to work within the cycle of automatic machinery. Such would be the explanation for the extensive use of measured daywork in the automobile industry. The most important advantage of measured daywork is that it avoids the difficulties inherent in output incentives. As mentioned before, the fault with many incentive systems is that they deteriorate. Since most incentive systems are difficult to abandon, the firm that operates on measured daywork has not locked itself into a difficult situation. On the positive side, measured daywork allows a firm to introduce change with minimum resistance. Since the worker continues to receive his accustomed pay, he does not express the same resistance to new methods and production standards as does an incentive worker. Indeed, compaanies operating on measured daywork feel that what they gain by being able to install new methods and equipment quickly and effectively more than offsets what they may lose in slower work pace. Companies using measured daywork have also encountered some disadvantages. In order to elicit acceptable performance, it is necessary in some situations to use coercive techniques, such as discipline, often with a cost to employee relations. The automobile companies in the United States have frequently encountered strikes and slowdowns over what has been termed the "effort bargain" (Behrend 1957). There is not much evidence about the operating results of measured daywork. One comparative study sheds some light on the question, however. Worker effort in some of the measured daywork plants was as high or higher than in the incentive plants. In the incentive plants where output was higher, the higher earnings more than offset the effect on costs of higher productivity (McKersie 1959). Trends and conclusions. There appears to be an over-all growth in the use of different systems of incentive payment. In part this reflects the need felt by many managers to stimulate extra accomplishment. As certain developments have removed discretionary compensation from their hands—the emphasis on seniority for promotion, the emasculation of merit systems, and the growth of fringe benefits—managers have been forced to turn to
417
wage payment plans in order to increase employee motivation. The increasing accommodation between unions and the incentive principle has also contributed to this growth. Unions have curtailed their attempts to eliminate output incentives. Rather, they are more concerned with incentive abuses. In the case of cost reduction and profit sharing, unions have taken the initiative in proposing several installations. While output incentives appear to be on a plateau, the more indirect and larger group plans (cost reduction and profit sharing) appear to be growing in importance. No doubt this trend will continue as mechanization increases and as whitecollar employment continues to grow. It is quite probable that unions will become more intimately involved in the operation of these plans. Their participation should influence the design of wage payment systems. In particular, job security will be given more attention—by defining achievement in terms of a more effective utilization of nonlabor factors of production and, in some cases, by actually guaranteeing that no one will lose employment as a result of the incentive plan. ROBERT B. MCKERSIE [See also INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS, article on REWARD SYSTEMS AND INCENTIVES.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
BALDAMUS, W. 1961 Efficiency and Effort: An Analysis of Industrial Administration. London: Tavistock. BEHREND, HILDE 1957 The Effort-bargain. Industrial and Labor Relations Review 10:503-515. BELCHER, DAVID W. (1955) 1962 Wage and Salary Administration. 2d ed. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: PrenticeHall. BELCHER, DAVID W. 1960 Employee and Executive Compensation. Pages 73-131 in Industrial Relations Research Association, Employment Relations Research: A Summary and Appraisal. New York: Harper. BOLLE DE BAL, MARCEL 1964 En guise de reponse: Au dela de la crise de la remuneration au rendement. Sociologie du travail 6, no. 2:177-187. CAMPBELL, ROBERT W. (1960) 1966 Soviet Economic Power: Its Organization, Growth, and Challenge. 2d ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. DEJEAN, CHRISTIAN 1961 La crise du salaire au rendement: Un exemple beige. Sociologie du travail 3, no. 2:124-139. GILSON, THOMAS Q.; and LEFCOWITZ, MYRON J. 1957 A Plant-wide Productivity Bonus in a Small Factory: Study of an Unsuccessful Case. Industrial and Labor Relations Review 10:284-297. GUILBERT, MADELEINE 1960 Remuneration au temps et remunerations au rendement dans la metallurgie parisienne. Sociologie du travail 2, no. 2:107—121.
418
WAGES: Wage and Hour Legislation
HOFFMANN, CHARLES 1964 Work Incentives in Communist China. Industrial Relations 3:81-98. HUTCHINSON, JOHN G. 1963 Managing a Fair Day's Work: An Analysis of Work Standards in Operation. Univ. of Michigan, Bureau of Industrial Relations, Report No. 15. Ann Arbor: The Bureau. JEHRING, JOHN J.; and HELBURN, I. B. 1961 A Comprehensive Bibliography on Total Group Productivity Motivation in Business. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin, School of Commerce, Center for Productivity Motivation. KENNEDY, VAN DUSEN 1945 Union Policy and Incentive Wage Methods. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. LAJOINIE, GUY A. 1961 La suppression des salaires au rendement: Un essai de solution. Sociologie du travail 3, no. 2:140-160. LESIEUR, FREDERICK G. (editor) 1958 The Scanlon Plan: A Frontier in Labor-Management Cooperation. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press. LEWIS, L. EARL 1960 Extent of Incentive Pay in Manufacturing. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Monthly Labor Review 83:460-463. LUPTON, THOMAS 1963 On the Shop Floor: Two Studies of Workshop Organization and Output. Oxford: Pergamon. LUTZ, BURKART; and WILLENER, ALFRED 1960 Niveau de mecanisation et mode de remuneration. Luxembourg: Haute Autorite, Communaute Europeenne du Charbon et 1'Acier. McKERSiE, ROBERT B. 1959 Incentives and Daywork: A Comparative Analysis of Wage Payment Systems. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard Univ., Graduate School of Business Administration. MCKERSIE, ROBERT B. et al. 1964 Some Indicators of Incentive Plan Prevalence. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Monthly Labor Review 87:271-276. MARRIOTT, R. 1957 Incentive Payment Systems: A Review of Research and Opinion. London: Staples. METZGER, BERTRAM L. 1964 Profit Sharing in Perspective: In American Medium-sized and Small Business. Evanston, 111.: Profit Sharing Research Foundation. NATIONAL INDUSTRIAL CONFERENCE BOARD 1957 Sharing Profits With Employees. Studies in Personnel Policy, No. 162. New York: The Board, Division of Personnel Administration. PATTON, ARCH 1961 Men, Money and Motivation: Executive Compensation as an Instrument of Leadership. New York: McGraw-Hill. PAYNE, BRUCE 1951 Incentives That Work. Pages 2328 in Society for Advancement of Management, Fall Conference, 1951, Proceedings. New York: The Society. Profit Sharing Push. 1961 Wall Street Journal September 13, p. 41, col. 1. ROBERTSON, DONALD J. 1960 Factory Wage Structures and National Agreements. Cambridge Univ. Press. SELLIE, CLIFFORD 1961 Incentives Versus Measured Day Work. Industrial Management 3:15-19. SHIMMIN, SYLVIA 1959 Payment by Results: A Psychological Investigation. London: Staples. SHULTZ, GEORGE P.; and MCKERSIE, ROBERT B. 1967 Stimulating Productivity: Choices, Problems, and Shares. British Journal of Industrial Relations 5, no. 1:1-18. SLIGHTER, SUMNER H.; HEALY, JAMES J.; and LIVERNASH, E. R. 1960 The Impact of Collective Bargaining on Management. Washington: Brookings Institution.
WHYTE, WILLIAM F. 1955 Money and Motivation: An Analysis of Incentives in Industry. New York: Harper. WOLF, WILLIAM B. 1957 Wage Incentives as a Managerial Tool. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. IV WAGE AND HOUR LEGISLATION
In its broadest sense, the subject of wage and hour legislation includes all attempts by governments to regulate the remuneration or working hours of labor. In the narrower and also popular sense used here, the subject is confined to laws to compel or induce private employers to pay certain minimum wages and/or to limit the hours they require their employees to work. Excluded, consequently, are both determinations by governments of the wages and hours of their own employees and attempts to control maximum wages in private employment. Since the English legislation of 1802, the principal purpose of maximum-hour and minimum-wage legislation has been to improve the terms of employment of the least-fortunate wage earners. Complementary purposes have been evident at various times, however, such as to help settle union-employer disputes, to help equalize the labor costs of competing employers, to help spread available work among more persons, and to help increase aggregate purchasing power. Evolution toward laissez-faire. Social standards of remuneration and of schedules of work have been historically the rule rather than the exception. In relatively simple and stable societies, like those of medieval Europe, custom, rather than individual decisions or formal laws, largely controlled these matters. In Europe from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries, customs were successively replaced by the more explicit regulations of the craft guilds, the towns, and the emerging national states, so as to control wages and hours in the face of the sweeping changes of those times in trade, population, and production techniques. None of these earlier regulations was intended to equalize or to improve the position of labor groups. The French minimum-wage law of 1270 attempted to preserve the status quo against the competition of new production methods. The English Statute of Labourers of 1357 attempted to prevent wages from rising after the Black Death had cut the population in half. Henry vn even attempted to increase the hours of farm workers (from about 10 to 13 or 14 hours per day) by an English royal statute of 1495. Elizabeth i, in 1563, tried to cope with rising and chaotic prices by the Statute of Apprentices which, among other things, standardized hours (at 13J or 14| per day for farm work)
WAGES: Wage and Hour Legislation and provided that wages of all kinds were to be fixed annually in each county by the justice of the peace. For some centuries employers used this judicial fixing of rates as an instrument of the mercantilist policy of keeping wages as low as possible. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the early unions tried to get legal wages fixed in an effort to protect workers against the competition of those dispossessed by the enclosures, and of the cheap output of the domestic and early factory systems, but for this purpose the unions appealed to the justices in vain. Gradually, as the Statute of Apprentices fell into disuse, wage and hour decisions were left entirely to individual employers. In this area laissez-faire had become the usual practice in Britain, even before Adam Smith popularized the doctrine that economic affairs in general should be left to control by market forces alone, rather than by legislation. This laissez-faire doctrine dominated economic policy in Britain until the 1880s; it spread throughout the world as each country became industrialized; and until the 1930s it was enshrined in U.S. court decisions which repeatedly nullified legislative attempts to control wages and hours. [See LAISSEZ-FAIRE.] Reactions against laissez-faire. Around the beginning of the nineteenth century, the most helpless of the uprooted British workers were toiling for as long as 18 hours a day for wages so low as to severely undermine health and shorten life. Such conditions gradually led to humanitarian demands for some legal minimum terms of employment. The resulting new legislation, in contrast to that of the preindustrial era, represented attempts to improve the worst of the existing conditions of employment rather than to preserve established standards. Hours of work were more easily observed and controlled than were wages. Accordingly, the British statutes of 1802, 1819, 1833 and 1847 began by progressively limiting the working hours, first of children and then of women, until by 1847 the ten-hour day had become the general standard in British factories. Because factory operation required uniform working schedules, the working hours of men were in practice reduced along with those of children and women. Because the lowest of the actual wages paid had been close to a starvation level, the previous total earnings generally had to be maintained, even though the hours were reduced. Thus an indirect effect of the hours legislation was to raise wage rates. The further reduction of standard working hours from 10 per day (for at least a six-day week) to 48 per week was first achieved by means of direct
419
labor union pressure on employers rather than by hours legislation. These shorter hours, as provided for in collective bargaining agreements, became effective at different times in different countries, districts, and industries, with Britain generally in the lead from 1850 to the 1880s and Australasia leading from the 1800s to the 1930s. During or shortly following World War i, the majority of the unionized workers in the more industrialized countries had attained a normal eight-hour day. In Australasia, continental Europe, and Latin America, legislation was generally used to extend to other wage earners the limitations on hours which unions had already obtained for their own members. During the 1920s and 1930s, the most common type of hours legislation provided for a basic 48-hour week, with overtime rates ranging from 110 to 150 per cent of regular rates of pay. The spread of such standards was encouraged by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), whose hours conventions of 1930 and 1935 provided for basic hours of 8 per day or 48 per week and for overtime rates of 125 per cent of regular pay. A proposed ILO convention which would have set a 40-hour standard was defeated in 1939 because of the pressure for rearmament at that time, and since World War 11 there has been no broad international movement toward a further shortening of hours. By 1962, however, the ILO 48-hour conventions of 1930 and 1935 had been ratified (subject to some reservations and exceptions) by 38 countries, including the newer nations of Burma, India, Iraq, Israel, Kuwait, Pakistan, Syria, and the United Arab Republic. Modern minimum-wage legislation lagged about a century behind maximum-hours legislation, appearing in New Zealand in 1894, in Great Britain in 1909, and in the United States (Massachusetts) in 1912. Employers showed the stiffest resistance to the curtailment of their most cherished freedom to offer such wages as they might choose. At the same time labor unions, at first and especially in the United States, often feared that governmental wage fixing would undermine their opportunities to organize and to engage in free collective bargaining. Governments themselves also faced novel technical problems in framing practical and enforceable wage legislation, in view of the wide diversity and fluctuations of actual wages. In New Zealand in 1894 and in the Australian Commonwealth and its states from 1896 to 1910, the government fixing of both minimum wages and maximum hours was generally combined with compulsory governmental arbitration of labor disputes. Thus the purpose of improving the terms
420
WAGES: Wage and Hour Legislation
of employment was joined with the purpose of preserving industrial peace. Not only minimum wages but also the whole structure of wages has come largely under government control in Australasia, as the arbitration courts have made awards in dispute cases while wage boards have set legal minimum wages for trades not sufficiently well organized to threaten to strike. Nationwide wage relationships in Australia have also been coordinated by the government, as the Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration (established in 1904) has made awards in interstate disputes and, since 1907, has exercised considerable influence on the arbitration courts and wage boards of the individual Australian states. In Great Britain, as in New Zealand and Australia, the evils of excessively low wages had been the subject of protest by reformist groups from the 1800s onward, and the British Trades Boards Act of 1909 was directly inspired by the Australasian examples. Britain rejected the compulsory arbitration feature of the Australasian statutes but did provide for the appointment of tripartite boards to make minimum wage awards for trades in which the Ministry of Labour found wages to be "exceptionally low." As in Australasia, the minimum-wage awards in Britain applied to adult men as well as to women and children, and they frequently went beyond the fixing of a single minimum by specifying several graded occupational piece rates or hourly rates in any one industry. During World War i, the scope of the trades boards was extended with the aim of setting legal minimum wages in all industries where wages were not already established by employer-union agreements. Thus by 1921, 63 boards had been appointed for 39 industries which employed a total of some 3 million workers. Since 1921 the scope of the trade board system has reverted to the more limited concept of attempting to raise only exceptionally low wages, and by 1935 the awards of 44 boards then in effect applied only to industries employing about 1.1 million workers (excluding Ireland). Some form of government control of the wages which can be paid by private enterprises is now attempted in almost every country that has a stable government, but there are wide variations between countries in the objectives, coverages, mechanisms, and effectiveness of their wage-control laws. The International Labour Office convention of 1928 (amended in 1946) attempted no more than to get agreement on the machinery for fixing of minimum wages. By 1960, 27 nations had ratified this convention, and at least 4 other nations which had not ratified had, in fact, enacted min-
imum-wage laws (Japan, Jordan, the Philippines, and the United States). Apart from direct governmental wage fixing, the steadily growing importance of government employment throughout the world had increased the indirect influence of the wages that governments pay to their own employees on the wages that actually must be paid by private employers. U.S. experience. Each of the several diverse purposes of wage and hour controls has been illustrated by the history of such legislation in the United States. Although maximum-hours and minimum-wage laws were initiated in the United States almost as early as in Britain, prior to the 1930s they had been enacted by only a minority of the individual states and only for a small minority of the wage earners in those states (usually only women in selected industries). Even when enacted, such laws could be enforced only if the courts found them to involve no more than a "reasonable" restraint on the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of individual contract. The adoption of uniform national standards was impeded not only by the wide range of actual wages and hours within the country but also by the constitutional division of authority between the federal and the many state governments and also between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of each of these governments. In sharp contrast to the early experience, however, wage and hour legislation in the United States since the 1930s has been exceptionally comprehensive, flexible, and effectual. The U.S. courts have always been disposed to permit any governmental body to require compliance with any labor standards that government might stipulate as a condition of its own contracts with private employers. Exercising this right, the federal government set a basic ten-hour day for its own employees as early as 1840. This was reduced to eight hours and the requirement extended to its contracted work under statutes of 1868, 1892, and 1912. Since 1931 (Davis-Bacon Act) the public works contractors of the federal government have been required to pay neither less nor more than the officially determined "prevailing local wages rates" to their employees at the sites of such construction, and since 1936 (Walsh-Healey Public Contracts Act) the "prevailing rate" requirement has been extended to the manufacture, assembly, and handling of materials purchased by the federal government (under contracts of more than $10,000 apiece). Maximum hours on federally financed public works were set as low as 30 per week between 1932 and 1936, in an attempt to spread work during the depression, and since 1936
WAGES: Wage and Hour Legislation the maximum basic hours under both the public works and procurement contracts have been limited to 8 per day and 40 per week. In addition, individual state and local governments frequently set maximum hours and occasionally set minimum wages as conditions of their own contracts with private employers. Except for government contractors and for work that was either exceptionally hazardous or that especially involved the safety of the public, the U.S. courts long maintained that any legal regulation of hours or wages represented an unconstitutional interference with freedom of contract. Maximum hours laws for women were admitted to be both the most necessary and most nearly justified as a reasonable restraint of individual freedom. But while a ten-hour law was passed as early as 1847 (New Hampshire), such legislation was nullified by the courts in 1895 (Ritchie vs. People, Illinois) and not accepted by the U.S. Supreme Court until 1908. By 1915, however, the U.S. Supreme Court had upheld even an eight-hour law for women (Miller vs. Wilson}; and by 1961 all but 2 of the 52 states and territories had set some legal limitations on women's working hours, the maximum being 48 hours or less in 22 states. Minimum-wage legislation for women, initiated by Massachusetts in 1912, appeared to have obtained acceptance by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1917 (Stetter vs. O'Hara, 243 U.S. 629) but in 1923 was struck down by that Court (Adkins vs. Children's Hospital, 261 U.S. 525) in a decision that was not reversed until 1937 (West Coast Hotel Company vs. Parrish, 300 U.S. 329). As of 1961, minimum-wage laws had been enacted for women in 35 of the 52 states and territories, and 15 of these laws covered men also. However, the federal legislation of 1938 effectually limited the jurisdiction of any state to firms whose trade was essentially confined within the area of that state. The great depression of the 1930s brought about the first attempt by the federal government at comprehensive wage and hour control under the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) of 1933. This legislation aimed not only to improve the condition of the lowest-paid workers but particularly to stimulate business recovery, both by stopping the competitive undercutting of wage rates and by raising wage rates to increase aggregate purchasing power. The wage and hour standards under the NIRA were contained in some 557 "codes of fair competition" as proposed by the employers for each industry. The experiment was short-lived, being discontinued in 1935, after the U.S. Supreme Court decided against enforcement
421
of the act in the first test case brought before it (Schecter Poultry Company vs. United States, 295 U.S. 495). Comprehensive federal wage and hour controls were restored in modified form by the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938 (the "wage-hour law"), following the aforementioned reversal in 1937 of the Supreme Court's general position on the constitutionality of minimum-wage legislation. While the separate state laws have continued to set maximum hours and minimum wages for many of the local industries (which tend to pay the lowest wages), the federal law has covered the dominant group of workers involved in interstate commerce and, as such, is the most influential single wage or hour statute in the world. Conspicuously omitted from the 1938 act were the trade-practice provisions and the price-fixing opportunities of the former NIRA, as well as the varying wage and hour standards previously formulated by employer groups for each industry. Instead, the FLSA initially fixed a single, nationwide minimum wage of 25 cents per hour and a uniform 50 per cent premium rate for all hours worked by an individual in excess of 40 per week. This "floor under wages and ceiling over hours" was expected to do something to prevent extreme forms of wage-cutting competition which might intensify a future business depression. However, the primary purpose of the wage-hour law was not that of attempting to stimulate business recovery by raising all wage rates, but rather the more familiar purpose of bringing the terms of employment of a minority of the least fortunate workers up to a minimum level "necessary for health, efficiency and general well-being." This primary aim was not to be achieved immediately but "as rapidly as practicable . . . without substantially curtailing employment or earning power." These phrases from the statute's statement of policy reflected awareness of some price elasticity of the various demands for labor. Accordingly, standards were raised from a low initial level, and the coverage of the act was extended only gradually and cautiously. Tripartite industry committees were used to recommend minimum rates above 25 cents an hour in the territories and above the second-year mandatory rate of 30 cents elsewhere. The swift rise in prices and wages after the outbreak of World War ii made it easy to achieve a universal 40-cent minimum by 1944 (except in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands) without fear of substantially curtailing employment. After World War n, the minimum rates for the continental United States were raised by amend-
422
WAGES: Wage and Hour Legislation
merits to the 1938 act rather than by the industryby-industry committee procedure. A 1949 amendment raised the minimum to 75 cents an hour, and a 1955 amendment further advanced the minimum to $1.00 an hour. In 1961 the coverage of the act was importantly extended for the first time to certain trade and service industries. To give the newly covered industries more time to adjust to the federal minimums, two schedules of automatic future increases were adopted. For all previously covered employees, the minimum was raised in 1961 to $1.15 and automatically advanced to $1.25 in 1963. The minimum for those covered for the first time in 1961 remained at $1.00 until 1964 and then rose to $1.15 and further to $1.25 in 1965. Control of working hours by requiring overtime pay at 1^ times each employee's regular rate (not merely the minimum rate) has been retained without change, and for employees covered before 1961 the 40-hour basic week has also remained unchanged. Since the workers first covered in 1961 consisted largely of those industries where actual hours—especially in peak seasons—had frequently been considerably longer than 40 per week, a gradual adjustment to the 40-hour standard was permitted. No premium overtime pay was required for the newly covered workers during the years 1961 and 1962, and the 50 per cent premium began only after 44 hours in 1963, after 42 hours in 1964, and after 40 hours per week from 1965 onward. Effectiveness and effects. Wage and hour legislation sometimes has consisted of a mere proclamation of a standard, the mere authorization of some machinery to fix wages or hours, or the issuance of some regulations which were not enforced. Furthermore, during periods of general price and wage inflation, a minimum wage may fall behind the lowest wages actually paid, so that even a nominal increase in the legal minimum rate may require little change in the money wages that would have been paid in any case. Even when the wage or hour legislation does require some change in minimum standards, the great majority of employers and employees may not be affected, at least not immediately and directly. In all such cases, both the proponents and opponents have been prone to exaggerate the actual consequences of wage and hour statutes. Judgment as to the actual results of effective wage and hour controls is necessarily dependent on which of their several purposes is chosen for the evaluation. The most usual, but by no means the only, purpose of such controls since the early
nineteenth century has been to improve the terms of employment of some least-fortunate fraction of the workers. This purpose has been highly objectionable, understandably and almost universally, to those employers who previously had worked their employees for longer or different hours or had employed them at lower wages than those required under the proposed legislation. The loyalty of employers to each other's interests usually has been sufficiently strong to induce employers generally either to support the objectors or to remain silent. However, once moderate improvements in labor standards have been enforced long enough to allow employers to adjust to them, their repeal has seldom been demanded, and employers have even praised them as helping to provide a basis for "decent" competition. Self-interested objectors to improvement of labor standards by law have usually sought to buttress their protests by appealing to the broader socialwelfare doctrine of laissez-faire. The modern form of reasoning used to support that doctrine (marginal productivity theory) often has been interpreted to mean that any enforced improvement of the terms of employment must adversely affect the volume of employment and, after adjustments are made, must obstruct the most economical allocation of existing resources to satisfy consumers' wants. Whatever its validity as an expression of general, economy-wide tendencies, this reasoning would support objection to moderate improvements of labor standards by law only if it were valid to presume that every employer was paying wages determined in a perfectly competitive labor market. Under modern labor market conditions, that presumption is quite unwarranted for many important reasons. A large increase in the wage will certainly result in some reduction of employment, but the short run wage-employment relationship is not necessarily a close or sensitive one, and employers frequently do pay less for a given quantity of labor than they could be made to pay without adverse effects on employment. Restriction of employment opportunities is, at the most, only one of the several choices actually made by the employer when hours are reduced or the wages of particular workers are raised. Even in the usual situation where improved labor standards do force up both unit costs and output prices, it may be the social value judgment that a. slight reduction in the welfare of consumers as a whole is of less importance than the mitigation of the poverty of the particular workers who otherwise have little chance to improve their conditions. Considerable empirical research has been con-
WAGES: Wage and Hour Legislation ducted during the last quarter of a century, especially in the United States, to provide a basis for estimating the immediate direct and indirect effects of specific, alternative minimum-wage scales and for assessing the relative importance of the various actual employer adjustments to increased minimum wages—including the absorption of costs or the offsetting of costs by curtailing employment, increasing output prices, curtailing services to buyers, or adopting a variety of more efficient management methods. These studies do not, of course, support the view that wages can be raised or hours reduced to any desired extent without some adverse consequences even to the least fortunate workers themselves. They do suggest strongly that moderate and gradual enforced improvements in the poorest of the terms of employment have actually benefited the workers affected and the communities in which they lived, without major adverse consequences of any kind. At the least, wage and hour legislation appears to have been moderately successful in insuring that some of the fruits of rising average output per worker will be used to improve the welfare of the lowest-wage workers. Some disemployment of the workers who were the least highly regarded by their employers has indeed occurred, but the percentage reduction of employment has been generally much less than the percentage increase in wages (indicating a low short-run price elasticity of such demands for labor). Skill differentials in wages have generally been compressed immediately following an enforced rise in the minimum wages, but these differentials have tended to be partially restored over more extended periods of time. The relatively low incidence of adverse effects of wage and hour legislation on either employers or employees has encouraged the fixing of standards by statute rather than by the more painstaking and painful examination of each situation by representative boards or committees. The statutory method of setting standards runs the risk, however, of either letting the improvement of standards fall behind what could be accomplished or of courting unintended adverse effects in the particular situations which fail to fit the general formula. The research studies of the effects of wage and hour legislation, although promising, still leave very much to be desired. Essential to further progress are more studies that concentrate attention on those enterprises and communities actually affected to a considerable extent by a new legal standard, rather than studies of over-all results, including the negative ones and the mass of the cases which were not affected at all. Furthermore, much
423
more accurate definition and measurement is needed of the economic climate in which each of the changes in a wage or hour standard is imposed. Finally, it should be recognized that empirical studies can furnish no more than a basis for informed inferences as to the pure effects of wage and hour legislation, because each situation will contain some uncontrolled and unmeasured variables and because the future is never completely predictable. The U.S. federal legislation of 1966, although containing large increases in minimum rates and extensions in federal coverage, does not represent any change in the limited objectives and gradualistic methods of modern minimum wage laws. The new federal rates, first effective in February 1967, ranged from $1.00 for newly covered workers to $1.40 for the 30 million previously covered workers, with both groups of rates scheduled to advance automatically up to $1.60 in future years. More of an innovation, perhaps, was the massive shift of some eight million workers from diverse standards to uniform federal standards and the coverage of some farm employees for the first time. Evaluation of these changes must await studies of specific future experience. N. ARNOLD TOLLES [See also LABOR FORCE, article on HOURS OF WORK.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
BLUM, FRED H. 1956 The Social and Economic Implications of the Fair Labor Standards Act: An Interpretation in Terms of Social Cost. Industrial Research Association, Proceedings 9:167-183. -> See pages 184194 for discussions by J. H. Van Sickle, Lazare Teper, and N. Arnold Tolles. BURNS, E. M. 1933 Minimum Wage. Volume 10, pages 491-495 in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences. New York: Macmillan. CULLEN, DONALD E. 1961 Minimum Wage Laws. Cornell University, New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Bulletin No. 43. Ithaca, N.Y.: The School. DOUTY, HARRY M. 1960 Some Effects of the $1.00 Minimum Wage in the United States. Economica New Series 27: 137-147. HICKS, J. R. (1932) 1964 The Theory of Wages. New York: St. Martins. -> See especially pages 179-216, "Wage-regulation and Unemployment," and pages 218226, "Hours and Conditions." KARLIN, JACK I. 1967 Economic Effects of the 1966 Changes in the FLSA. Monthly Labor Review 90, no. 6:21-25. KOCIN, SUSAN 1967 Basic Provisions of the 1966 FLSA Amendments. Monthly Labor Review 90, no. 3:1—4. LUBIN, ISADOR; and PEARCE, CHARLES A. 1958 New York's Minimum Wage Law: The First Twenty Years. Industrial and Labor Relations Review 11:203-219. LYON, LEVERETT S. et al. 1935 The National Recovery
424
WAGES: Fringe Benefits
Administration: An Analysis and Appraisal. Washington: Brookings Institution. MARTIN, EDWARD C. 1967 Extent of Coverage Under FLSA as Amended in 1966. Monthly Labor Review 90, no. 4:21-24. MILLIS, HARRY A,; and MONTGOMERY, ROYAL 1938 Labor's Progress and Some Basic Labor Problems. New York: McGraw-Hill. -> See especially pages 278375, "Government Regulation of Wages," and pages 463-536, "Hours of Work." NEW YORK STATE, DEPARTMENT OF LABOR, DIVISION OF RESEARCH AND STATISTICS 1964 Economic Effects of Minimum Wages: The New York Retail Trade Order of 1957. Albany, N.Y.: The Department. PRINCETON UNIVERSITY, INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS SECTION 1955 Economic Issues in Federal Minimum Wage Legislation: Selected References. Princeton Univ. Press. PRINCETON UNIVERSITY, INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS SECTION 1963 Hours of Work: Selected References. Princeton Univ. Press. SELLS, DOROTHY M. 1939 British Wages Boards: A Study in Industrial Democracy. Washington: Brookings Institution. TOLLES, N. ARNOLD 1959 American Minimum Wage Laws: Their Purposes and Results. Industrial Research Association, Proceedings 12:116-133. -» See pages 134-143 for discussions by Peter Henle and John M. Peterson. TOLLES, N. ARNOLD 1964 Origins of Modern Wage Theories. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. -> See especially pages 108-125, "National Minimum Wages: NRA and the Wage-Hour Law." WEISS, HARRY 1956 Economic Effects of a Nationwide Minimum Wage. Industrial Research Association, Proceedings 9:154-166. -» See pages 184-194 for discussions by J. H. Van Sickle, Lazare Teper, and N. Arnold Tolles. WOYTINSKY, WLADIMIR 1932 Hours of Labor. Volume 7, pages 478-493 in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences. New York: Macmillan.
FRINGE BENEFITS
"Fringe benefits" is a term embracing a variety of employee benefits paid by employers and supplementing the worker's basic wage or salary. In an industrial society the basic method of compensating an employee for his labor has been the payment of a wage or salary for each unit of time spent on the job (or each unit of work completed). Traditionally, the obligation of the employer to his employee was considered complete with the payment of this basic compensation. With increasing industrialization and rising incomes, the interests of employees in compensation has widened to include more than this basic payment, and concurrently the employer's ability to provide supplementary items of compensation has improved. Conceivably the development of many supplementary compensation practices could have been financed through higher wages, thus permit-
ting employees to purchase directly such fringe benefits as health insurance and retirement annuities. Two factors, however, have contributed to direct financing by employers. (1) Because employer payments can be made with "before-tax" dollars, direct financing can provide greater benefits to employees for a given sum of money than would be obtained if the same amount were distributed as wages, on which each employee is forced to pay taxes. (2) Lower costs for benefits financed through insurance can be obtained by covering a large number of employees. There is no universally accepted group of practices embraced by the term "fringe benefits." Generally, it can be said that a fringe benefit has to meet two tests: it must provide a specific benefit to an employee, and it must represent a cost to the employer. Clearly included within this concept are payments to employees for various types of paid leave (vacation, holiday, military duty, personal) and payments for various welfare benefits (retirement, health, life insurance, unemployment). Another group of fringe benefits are those financed by employer payments under government programs. In the United States typical examples are the employer's taxes paid to the federal government under the Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance system, his state taxes for unemployment insurance, and his required payments for workmen's compensation. In these instances, the law sets the standards under which payments are made and benefits distributed. A final group of payments often classified as fringe benefits are made by employers for work performed at specific times or under specific conditions. An example is premium pay for overtime work or for work on Sunday or holidays, shift differentials, and additional payments for work performed under hazardous conditions. Other examples of payments which, under some classifications, are considered fringe benefits are contributions to profit-sharing, thrift, or savings plans, moving expenses, educational or training expenses, and employer-financed recreational activities for employees. Fringe benefits evolved slowly in the United States and other industrializing countries. The limitations imposed by shortages of capital, low productivity, and low levels of income invariably led to an emphasis on the basic wage payment. The early unions concentrated on higher wages and shorter hours. While some fringe benefits originated almost at the start of industrial organization, these were largely confined to managerial or salaried em-
WAGES: Fringe Benefits ployees. In some cases employers extended these benefits to manual workers, either on their own volition or as the result of actual or threatened union organizing efforts. The rapid development of fringe benefits in recent years, commencing with the 1930s, has brought greater parity in this regard between "blue-collar" and "white-collar" workers. The growth of certain fringe benefits in the United States has been stimulated by governmental actions. Social security programs and the statutory overtime premium were adopted during the 1930s. The growth of private pension plans has been assisted by special tax treatment for money set aside by employers in a special retirement fund and by rulings of the National Labor Relations Board and the courts declaring pension plans within the scope of legal collective bargaining. The development of fringe benefits started later in the United States than in many other industrialized nations, where public social security programs were initiated long before the New Deal. For many European countries, including France, West Germany, and Italy, fringe benefits constitute a higher proportion of total compensation than in the United States. In Great Britain, however, the proportion is roughly comparable to that of the United States, although it should be noted that certain social security programs financed through general tax revenue are more comprehensive than those in the United States. A major difference between the United States experience and that of most European countries is that in the United States the greater proportion of fringe benefits has been initiated through collective bargaining, whereas in European countries the prevailing practice has been set by legislation. For example, most European countries prescribe vacation and holiday practices through legislation, but not the United States. In recent years, however, European collective bargaining agreements have been including more provisions dealing with fringe benefits. The various types of fringe benefits reflect the different attitudes or interests of workers and employers. Vacations and holidays. The development of paid leave practices, consisting largely of paid vacations and paid holidays, reflects what might be called "the quest for leisure." For most workers in the United States, paid leisure of this type represents a post-World War n phenomenon. A 1940 study disclosed that only about one-fourth of union members were eligible for annual vacations, and for most of these the maximum vacation period was one week. Although major holidays were fre-
425
quently observed throughout industry, the practice of providing holiday pay for hourly rated employees was quite rare. By 1967, almost all workers covered by bargaining agreements were eligible for paid vacations, and judging by the major agreements, over 70 per cent of these agreements provide at least a fourweek vacation for longer-service employees. Fiveweek and longer vacations are now found in about 15 per cent of major bargaining agreements. Similarly, the most recent survey of holiday provisions in major bargaining agreements indicates that about 90 per cent of the workers covered were entitled to paid holidays. Nearly all of these were entitled to at least six holidays, and more than four-fifths of them received seven or more paid holidays. Disability and unemployment. Another major stream in the development of fringe benefits originated with the worker's need for supplementary income to meet hardships imposed when he is prevented from working by disability or lack of employment opportunities. In many countries, including the United States, government programs are generally available to assist on these occasions. However, United States government programs for wage replacement of losses resulting from nonoccupational disabilities are limited to four states and railroad employees. To fill the gap left by the lack of U.S. government programs for off-the-job accidents and illnesses and to supplement public programs for unemployment insurance, private arrangements have been developed through collective bargaining and through unilateral actions by employers. By 1967, three out of five workers in private nonfarm industry were protected by some type of temporary-disability benefit plan: a formal sick-leave plan, an insured accident and sickness plan, or a government-operated plan. Private programs to supplement state unemployment insurance were first introduced in 1955, when this type of program was incorporated into the bargaining agreements in the automobile industry. Within nine months after this contract was adopted, these plans had spread to cover more than 1.2 million workers. At the present time, an estimated 2.5 million workers are covered by plans in the auto, steel, rubber, apparel, cement, flat glass and other industries. Health. To meet the costs of personal health care of employees and their dependents, health insurance and prepayment plans have been widely adopted by American industry. Hospital and surgical benefits now cover three out of four wage and
426
WAGES: Fringe Benefits
salary workers; three out of five have regular medical benefits coverage; and in a rapidly growing development, over one out of four has major medical expense coverage to help defray unusually large health care expenses. While the employer in nearly all cases pays some part of the cost, frequently the entire amount, the cost of dependent coverage is often borne by the employee. In recent years, hospital and surgical benefits have been improved to cover additional costs and services. Supplementary protection has been extended by many plans to retired workers (who are covered after age 65 by the federal government's Medicare program) and, to a lesser extent, to employees on temporary layoff. Some progress has been made in the last few years in extending benefits to the costs of dental and optical care and long-term disability. Life insurance. Even more prevalent than hospital benefits are death benefits, which are usually provided through group life insurance. Currently, over two out of three wage and salary workers have such protection, and coverage is often extended to laid-off and retired workers and, to a lesser extent, to the dependents of active workers. Although the amount of coverage for active employees varies widely, the median is around one year's earnings. Under most collectively bargained plans, the entire cost of at least some employee coverage is paid by the employer; under most nonnegotiated plans, the employee usually pays a substantial part of the cost. Additional coverage is often made available to employees at their own expense. Pension plans. A similar development is the growth of private pension plans. The importance of these arrangements is underscored by the increasing life expectancy, under which the average employee in the United States can look forward to 14 years of retirement after reaching the normal retirement age of 65. Government programs for retirement income are well developed in most countries. The basic United States program (Social Security) was one of the most significant of the New Deal measures enacted during the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Passed in 1936, it has been broadened several times by Congress and now includes, in addition to higher levels of benefits for retiring workers, benefits for survivors and for covered workers who become permanently and totally disabled. The emphasis in the public program is necessarily placed on providing basic retirement benefits to all members of the labor force. It provides the worker with low earnings a relatively
larger benefit than the worker with higher earnings and sets a maximum limit to the taxable earnings on which benefits are based. Consequently, the need has arisen for supplemental private pension plans to yield for many workers a more satisfactory level of retirement income. In 1967, private retirement plans, including deferred profit-sharing plans, covered over 25 million workers, or about half the employees in private nonfarm establishments. Collectively bargained pension plans covered about 11 million workers. The employer pays the entire cost of over twothirds of the plans; in the jointly financed plans to which employees also make contributions, the employer pays the major proportion of the cost. Included in the total are nearly one thousand multiemployer pension plans, covering about 4 million workers. Multiemployer pension plans differ from single-employer plans in two important respects: (1) their pension credits are portable, in that employees may accumulate credits by working for any employer who belongs to the plan; and (2) the employer members agree with the union to contribute to the plan at a certain rate—usually a specified number of cents per man-hour or per cent of payroll—rather than to provide specified pension benefits. The benefits are subsequently determined by a joint union-management board of trustees. Benefit levels vary widely among pension plans and often within plans, depending on the specific benefit formula. Under the benefit formulas for current service in effect in 1963, the median pension payable at age 65 to workers with average annual earnings of $4,800 was about $54 a month for 20 years of credited service and $78 for 30 years. Contributory plans normally provide higher benefits than noncontributory plans. Premium pay. Another major set of fringe benefits grows out of the practice of providing premium pay for work performed after the normal day's or week's work is completed or at inconvenient times or under especially hazardous conditions. While such premiums are common in industrialized countries, the premium rates in the United States are generally higher than in most other countries. The rate of time and a half for work performed after 40 hours in any one work week was a basic provision of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act. In many industries collective bargaining agreements make provision for premium payments after eight hours in any one day and for work performed on the weekend, regardless of the total number of
WAGES: Fringe Benefits hours worked during the week. Higher premiums generally prevail for work performed on a Sunday or a holiday. Higher payments for work performed on a second or third shift are also common. Typical shift differentials in the United States range between 8 and 11 cents an hour for the second shift and between 11 and 13 cents an hour for the third shift. Premium payment for especially hazardous work is found in the longshoring, maritime, and construction industries. Extension of benefits. Fringe benefit practices are among the most rapidly changing aspects of industrial relations. In 1966, for example, almost four-fifths of all major collective bargaining settlements involved new or liberalized fringe benefits. The most rapidly changing benefits were health and welfare plans, modified in nearly three-fifths of the settlements. Changes in retirement plans and paid vacations appeared in almost half the newly negotiated contracts. Changes have been of two types: certain existing fringe benefits have been liberalized, for example, the length of service required to obtain longer vacations has been reduced; in addition, certain types of fringe benefits have spread to parts of the economy where they were formerly considered impractical. The construction industry, despite its multitude of small contractors and high turnover rate, has been able to develop special funds not only for health and retirement benefits but also for vacation payments. In many cases, multiemployer retirement plans have been developed in industries where individual employer plans would be impractical. Fringe benefits have also proved to be a useful tool in meeting specialized problems of adjustments to technological change involving possible reductions in the work force. In recent years supplementary unemployment benefits (SUB) have been revised not only to provide higher weekly payments and more weeks of benefits but also to cover short work weeks and to pay other benefits from SUB funds. In the case of the automobile agreements, the funds are also used to finance separation allowances; hospital, medical, and surgical insurance for laid-off workers eligible for SUB benefits and their dependents; and if there are sufficient funds, a cash payment is made at the end of the year. Another way in which fringe benefits have helped to meet industry problems of adjustment is by the adoption of more liberalized early retirement in situations where older workers have been
427
affected by layoffs and plant shutdowns. The use of severance payments for laid-off workers is also increasing and was a crucial element in the final arbitration award settling the 1959-1963 dispute in the United States between the railroads and the unions of operating employees. The award authorized the discharge of firemen but awarded them severance payments depending upon their accumulated service. Problems. The widespread adoption of fringe benefits has raised several issues involving the effective functioning of an economy. A few of the most important are the following. Increasing cost of fringe benefits. In 1962, the average United States manufacturing establishment paid an amount equal to 22 per cent of payroll in fringe benefit costs. This represented an increase from 20 per cent in 1959. Comparable expenditures in mining were 26 per cent in I960; and in finance, insurance, and real estate 23 per cent in 1961. Among individual industries, wide differences in fringe benefit costs generally reflect similar differences in wage rates. Increases in fringe benefit costs affect an individual firm's total labor costs and become one factor in affecting the firm's decisions regarding prices. For an economy as a whole, increases in total compensation (wages plus fringe benefits) which exceed increases in productivity lead to pressures for rising prices. Thus, the size of increases in fringe benefit expenditures is one important factor in determining changes in the level of prices. Another aspect of fringe benefit costs that has drawn attention is the impact of certain costs (particularly paid leave, welfare plans, and legally required payments) on the employer's willingness to hire additional employees. Since these benefits add to the cost of placing new workers on the payroll, the employer who has a choice may find that the additional cost of scheduling overtime work has diminished compared to the cost of hiring additional workers. Action to modify this disparity has become an issue of public policy in the United States, with labor unions contending that the overtime penalty rate under the Fair Labor Standards Act should be raised, while employers oppose this as an unduly burdensome and costly approach which would not yield additional jobs. Coordination of private and public programs. The development of private welfare programs has led to possible conflict and duplication with public programs in the fields of retirement, disability, and unemployment. Certain federal and state legisla-
428
WAGES: Fringe Benefits
tion in the United States is directed at these problems; but even at best, such legislation could not be expected to meet the many diverse needs throughout the country. The use of collective bargaining or employer personnel policies to supplement legislative standards has provided more adequate benefits and encouraged the development of programs tailored to meet the needs of specific industries, firms, or groups of workers. On the other hand, the question has been raised whether this procedure may not allow a relatively fortunate few to achieve high standards of protection while neglecting the more basic legislative standards on which the many must depend. Effect on worker's relation to his job. Another issue that has been raised is whether some fringe benefits have had the effect of tying the worker too closely to a single employer, thus preventing him from being more effectively used by another employer, possibly at a higher skill. A number of fringe benefits increase in value as the worker accumulates service on the job. Examples are the length of an employee's paid vacation or the size of his pension. Because of his equity in these benefits, an employee may be reluctant to shift jobs even for a higher basic wage rate. An employee shifting jobs at age 50, for example, may find upon retirement that he does not have enough service to qualify for a pension from either his old or his new employer. In any analysis of this issue, the difficulty has been to separate the specific effects of fringe benefits from the more general effect of seniority as a whole. It is true that job shifts are less common among older employees, but much of this simply reflects the individual's continued satisfaction with his job together with the security he has accumulated over a period of years. Fringe benefits may play but a small role in his reluctance to change. One approach to this question has been to develop modifications of fringe benefits to encourage greater mobility of the work force. One example is the introduction in private pension plans of provisions which vest in the individual employee who meets certain age and service requirements his right, at retirement age, to all or part of his accrued pension benefits regardless of his employment status at that time. PETER HENLE BIBLIOGRAPHY BEIER, EMERSON H. 1967 Terminations of Pension Plans: 11 Years' Experience. Monthly Labor Review 90, no. 6: 26-30. BERNSTEIN, MERTON C. 1964 The Future of Private Pensions. New York: Free Press.
BLOCK, JOSEPH W. 1956 Problems in Measurement of Expenditures on Selected Items of Supplementary Employee Remuneration: Manufacturing Establishments, 1953. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bulletin No. 1186. Washington: Government Printing Office. ENGEN, GUNNAR 1967 A New Direction and Growth in Profit Sharing. Monthly Labor Review 90, no. 7:1-8. Federal Employment—Retirement Insurance and Medical Care Programs. 1964 U.S. Civil Service Commission, Library Personnel Bibliography Series, No. 14. GREENE, DOROTHY [KITTNER] 1960 Health and Insurance Plans Under Collective Bargaining: Hospital Benefits, Early 1959. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bulletin No. 1274. Washington: Government Printing Office. -> Summarizes provisions of 300 plans. GREENE, DOROTHY [KITTNER]; and DAVIS, HARRY E. 1959 Health and Insurance Plans Under Collective Bargaining: Accident and Sickness Benefits, Fall 1958. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bulletin No. 1250. Washington: Government Printing Office. -> Summarizes provisions of 300 plans. HEALTH INSURANCE INSTITUTE, NEW YORK A List of Current Health Insurance Books. -» Published since 1959, under varying titles. HOLLAND, DANIEL M. 1966 Private Pension Funds: Projected Growth. National Bureau of Economic Research, Occasional Paper No. 97. New York: The Bureau; Columbia Univ. Press. KITTNER, DOROTHY R. 1961 Health and Insurance Plans Under Collective Bargaining: Life Insurance and Accidental Death and Dismemberment Benefits, Early Summer 1960. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bulletin No. 1296. Washington Government Printing Office. -> Summarizes provisions of 300 plans. KITTNER, DOROTHY R. 1962 Digest of Profit-sharing, Savings and Stock Purchase Plans, Winter 1961—1962. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bulletin No. 1325. Washington: Government Printing Office. -> Summarizes 20 selected plans. KITTNER, DOROTHY R.; and DAVIS, HARRY E. 1960 Health and Insurance Plans Under Collective Bargaining: Surgical and Medical Benefits, Late Summer 1959. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bulletin No. 1280. Washington: Government Printing Office. -> Summarizes provisions of 300 plans. KOLODRUBETZ, WALTER W. 1964 Labor Mobility and Private Pension Plans: Vesting, Early Retirement and Portability Provisions. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bulletin No. 1407. Washington: Government Printing Office. KOLODRUBETZ, WALTER W. 1967 Growth in Employeebenefit Plans, 1950-1965. Social Security Bulletin 30, no. 4:10-27. LANDAY, DONALD M. 1961 Health and Insurance Plans Under Collective Bargaining: Major Medical Expense Benefits, Fall 1960. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bulletin No. 1293. Washington: Government Printing Office. -» Summarizes provisions of 300 plans. McGiLL, DAN M. (1955) 1964 Fundamentals of Private Pensions. 2d ed. Homewood, 111.: Irwin. METZGER, BERTRAM L. 1966 Profit Sharing in Perspective. Evanston, 111.: Profit Sharing Research Foundation. MUNTS, RAYMOND 1967 Bargaining for Health. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press. PFEFFER, ALOYSIUS R. 1963 Employer Expenditures for Selected Supplementary Remuneration Practices for Production Workers in Mining Industries, 1960. U.S.
WAGNER, ADOLF Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bulletin No. 1332. Washington: Government Printing Office. ROSENBLOOM, HENRY S. 1960 Paid Sick Leave Provisions in Major Union Contracts, 1959. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bulletin No. 1282. Washington: Government Printing Office. SLIGHTER, SUMNER H.; HEALY, JAMES J.; and LIVERNASH, E. ROBERT 1960 The Impact of Collective Bargaining on Management. Washington: Brookings Institution. SOMERS, HERMAN M.; and SOMERS, ANNE R. 1961 Doctors, Patients, and Health Insurance: The Organization and Financing of Medical Care. Washington: Brookings Institution. STRASSER, ARNOLD 1964 Employer Expenditures for Selected Supplementary Compensation Practices for Production and Related Workers, Meatpacking and Processing Industries, 1962. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bulletin No. 1413. Washington: Government Printing Office. U.S. BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS 1959 Premium Pay for Night, Weekend, and Overtime Work in Major Union Contracts. Bulletin No. 1251. Washington: Government Printing Office. U.S. BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS 1962a Employer Expenditures for Selected Supplementary Remuneration Practices for Production Workers in Manufacturing Industries, 1959. Bulletin No. 1308. Washington: Government Printing Office. U.S. BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS 1962& Paid Leave Provisions in Major Contracts, 1961. Bulletin No. 1342. Washington: Government Printing Office. U.S. BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS 1964 Digest of Fifty Selected Health and Insurance Plans for Salaried Employees, Spring 1963. Bulletin No. 1377. Washington: Government Printing Office. U.S. BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS 1965a Digest of 100 Selected Pension Plans Under Collective Bargaining, Late 1964. Bulletin No. 1435. Washington: Government Printing Office. U.S. BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS 1965b Employer Expenditures for Selected Supplementary Compensation Practices for Production and Related Workers: Composition of Payroll Hours, Manufacturing Industries, 1962. Bulletin No. 1428. Washington: Government Printing Office. U.S. BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS 1965c Major Collective Bargaining Agreements: Severance Pay and Layoff Benefit Plans. Bulletin No. 1425-2. Washington: Government Printing Office. U.S. BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS 1965d Major Collective Bargaining Agreements: Supplemental Unemployment Benefit Plans and Wage—Employment Guarantees. Bulletin No. 1425-3. Washington: Government Printing Office. U.S. BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS 1965e Research Sources on Employees' Supplementary Benefits. Compiled by William Gerber. Mimeographed manuscript. -» Covers all areas of the world. U.S. BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS 1965f Supplementary Compensation for Nonproduction Workers, 1963. Bulletin No. 1470. Washington: Government Printing Office. U.S. BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS 1966a Digest of 50 Selected Pension Plans for Salaried Employees, Summer 1965. Bulletin No. 1477. Washington: Government Printing Office.
429
U.S. BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS 1966fo Digest of 100 Selected Health and Insurance Plans Under Collective Bargaining, Early 1966. Bulletin No. 1502. Washington: Government Printing Office. U.S. BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS 1966c Financing Supplemental Unemployment Benefit Plans. Bulletin No. 1483. Washington: Government Printing Office. U.S. BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS 1966d Private Pension Plan Benefits. Bulletin No. 1485. Washington: Government Printing Office. U.S. BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS Wages and Related Benefits: Major Labor Markets. -» Published since 1951/1952. An annual survey reporting prevalence of fringe benefits for individual labor markets (Part i) and for economic regions (Part 11). U.S. OFFICE OF LABOR-MANAGEMENT AND WELFARE-PENSION REPORTS 1967 Welfare and Pension Plan Statistics: Characteristics of 163,500 Plans Filed as of July 1, 1965. Washington: Government Printing Office. U.S. SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION Private Noninsured Pension Funds. -> Published annually since 1966. WEINTRAUB, GERALD D. 1964 Employer Expenditures for Selected Supplementary Remuneration Practices: Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate Industries, 1961. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bulletin No. 1419. Washington: Government Printing Office.
WAGNER, ADOLF Adolf Heinrich Gotthelf Wagner (1835-1917), German political economist, was born in Erlangen, the son of a professor of physiology. He grew up in Gottingen and studied jurisprudence and political economy in Heidelberg and Gottingen. Between 1858 and 1870 he held teaching positions in Vienna, Hamburg, Dorpat, and Freiburg im Breisgau. In 1870 he was appointed to a chair of political economy at the University of Berlin, which he held for 46 years. This coincided almost exactly with the life-span of the new German Empire, 1871-1918, of which Wagner was an ardent supporter, mentor, and occasional critic. He exerted a powerful influence as a writer of textbooks, monographs, and policy pamphlets and as a teacher of two generations of Prussian higher civil servants. Social philosophy. Wagner's historical importance rests perhaps not so much on his contributions to technical economics, although he earned international fame in the field of public finance, as on his position as a leading representative of a particular social philosophy. This philosophy has been variously labeled "state socialism," "socialism of the academic chair" (Kathedersozialismus), "conservative socialism," and, perhaps most appropriately, "social conservatism." He applied this philosophy with considerable coherence, energy, and success to the theory as well as
430
WAGNER, ADOLF
fated anti-Semitic Christian-Social party, serving the practice of the political economy of his time. An "Old Prussian" by choice, Wagner rejected, prias its first vice-president; increasingly disappointed, he left the movement in 1896. During the years marily on ethical grounds, the teachings of the 1882-1885 he served as a conservative member in laissez-faire, or Manchester, school as well as Marxthe lower house of the Prussian Diet. From 1885 ism and other variants of socialism proper. He agreed with much of the criticism of the emerging on, Wagner largely curtailed his public activities in favor of his academic work, with two excepindustrial-commercial capitalism made by socialists tions: he was the first president and always an and semisocialists like Sismondi, Rodbertus, Lassalle, and A. Schame, but from a conservative point active member of the Evangelical-Social Congress of view. In Franz Oppenheimer's words, Wagner founded in 1890, and in 1910 he was awarded lifebecame "the social-political conscience of Gertime membership in the upper house of the Prusmany." Although he accepted a social and economic sian Diet. order based primarily upon private property and a Economic theory. Especially in the second half large measure of private decision making, Wagner of his long career, Wagner devoted much effort to assigned to the state a major, positive role in social the elaboration and teaching of what he called and economic affairs, hoping thus to achieve a Grundlegungen, or principles. He saw these as morally satisfactory and stable reconciliation of inproviding a framework of basic concepts and clas-dividualistic and socialistic principles. The state, he sificatory schemes rather than a method of ecobelieved, should not merely redefine property and nomic analysis proper. His chief service to ecocontractual rights and obligations but should also nomic theory was to keep it alive against the own and manage certain sectors of the economy preponderant power of Schmoller's historical, or in(for example, railroads). Furthermore, it should stitutionalist, school at a time in Germany when, in intervene correctively in economic processes, for sharp contrast to developments abroad, there was instance, through protective tariffs, progressive invirtually no vigorous discussion or creative adcome and inheritance taxes, and social insurance vance in economic theory. In the famous Methoschemes. Thus, Wagner paved the way for, or at denstreit between Schmoller and Menger, Wagner least seconded, the economic- and social-reform maintained an eclectic position; his sympathies, policies of Bismarck and his successors, policies however, were much more with Menger than with in which concern for a measure of social justice Schmoller. In his own system of principles, Wagand social stability was fused with, and in effect ner followed, with some modifications, older "classubordinated to, the goal of preserving and sical" lines. Among theorists he especially adstrengthening the domestic and foreign power of mired Ricardo and Rodbertus, but he recognized the the German imperial state and its backbone, Pruscontributions of Alfred Marshall, Frank W. Taussia. Using religious (i.e., Protestant), ethical, sig, and even the Austrians. strongly nationalistic, and anti-Semitic arguments Wagner's modifications of classical theory per(the last becoming somewhat attenuated toward tained chiefly to economic sociology—that is, to the end of his life), Wagner supported the ultigeneralizations about social-economic data rather mately futile attempt to form an alliance between than to the development of economic theory in the the large landowners, the state bureaucracy, and narrow sense. They consisted chiefly of an unusuthe underprivileged working classes, in opposition ally careful differentiation of kinds of property and to the rising industrial, commercial, and financial a detailed analysis of economic motivation. Beinterests. cause of his legal training and the influence of Wagner asserted his social-reform conservatism Rodbertus, Wagner made one major concession to most publicly and actively during the period 1870the institutionalists: he stressed the importance of 1885. In 1872 he was, with his colleague G. "historical-legal" categories in economic life, espeSchmoller, one of the founders of the Verein fur cially with regard to the distribution of wealth and Sozialpolitik. Most German economists—and social income. In conjunction with his basic social phiscientists generally—belonged to this professional losophy, this historical-legal approach provided the organization, which sponsored many empirical theoretical basis for a comprehensive system of studies of economic social conditions and became economic, social, and fiscal policies by which the a strong force behind many reform measures. state was to cure, prevent, or compensate for the Around 1877, however, Wagner's active participaspecific evils of a modern industrial and commertion in this association decreased because the macial private economy. jority of its members preferred more moderate or Applied economics. Wagner's most successful even social-liberal views to Wagner's state socialapplication of the historical—legal approach and of ism. In 1881, Wagner joined Adolf Stocker's illhis views on policy was in public finance. His
WAGNER, ADOLF Finanzwissenschaft (1871-1872) was an outstanding success in terms of both scholarship and practical effects. It was filled with well-ordered statistical materials and historical and contemporary comparative descriptions, and in later editions it was increasingly based on a system of principles. The book broke with older and narrowly "fiscal" or "cameralistic" views, integrating public finance with the whole of economic and social conditions and policies. In particular, Wagner taught that a system of taxation should not merely aim at efficient provision for public revenue but should also fulfill the second and ultimately superior socialpolitical purpose of correcting distributional injustices of the market system in the direction of greater equality. Thus, progressive income and inheritance taxation—and generally the taxation of "unearned gains"—would be squarely based on criteria of distributive justice. This idea, although often qualified today by the use of other criteria, is still one of the foundations of modern progressive tax and public expenditure systems. Assigning to the state a remedial distributional function means, of course, an expansion of the public sector of the economy. One of Wagner's empirical "laws" of historical development asserts that state functions and public expenditures constantly expand with the progress of civilization. Although this generalization was based on a very limited set of rather crude data and although exceptions and reversals may be found, it has not, on the whole, been refuted by later developments. The policies that Wagner himself recommended with regard to public finance and social legislation contributed to the trend asserted in his "law"; but these policies were based at least as much on moral—political choice as on historical necessities. Wagner's second most important group of works on the border line of theory and practical economics—in point of time they were written first —dealt with monetary and banking theory and policy. Both in his Gottingen dissertation (1857) and in his book on the money and credit theory of Peel's Bank Act (1862), he sympathized strongly with the Banking school, exalted the merits of Thomas Tooke, and exhibited a distrust of "paper money." His ideas about the dangers of an inelastic money supply, expressed in these and in later voluminous writings, appear to have had some influence upon the legislation for the new German central bank (Reichsbank) of 1875. Other problem areas to which Wagner made significant contributions include public transportation, social insurance, tariff policies, urban rents, "moral statistics," and even the (nonmathematical) theory of statistical regularities.
431
Influential as Wagner was among his contemporaries, his fusion of ethical—political and scientific concerns and his "socialism of the academic chair" inevitably aroused strong opposition. During the Weimar period, Wagner's works, with the exception of his Finanzwirtschaft, seem to have been largely forgotten. After Hitler came to power, Wagner was both celebrated and condemned as a precursor of National Socialism and even as a fullfledged National Socialist. While similarities and affinities are undeniable, there remain fundamental differences between the social conservatism of the nineteenth-century Prussian scholar and Hitler's totalitarianism. Much, if not all, of Wagner's work now appears dated. Even his best professional achievements, for example, his contributions to the field of public finance, have largely been incorporated into or superseded by later work. His policy recommendations, intended to preserve and renew Prussia in the face of revolutionary economic, social, and political change, had a limited, temporary success but were ultimately timebound and doomed to fail. His basic social philosophy certainly produced no satisfactory synthesis of individualism and socialism. Nevertheless, a closer study of Wagner's state socialism and of imperial Germany might still prove valuable for the understanding of at least one area of social and economic development: it might provide some useful positive and negative lessons for some of the newly developing countries, all those that are trying both to find a position somewhere between capitalism and socialism and to reconcile the old order with the forces and demands of modernity. GERHARD MEYER [For the historical context of Wagner's work, see ECONOMIC THOUGHT; LAISSEZ-FAIRE; and the biographies of MARSHALL; MENGER; RICARDO; RODBERTUS; SCHMOLLER; TAUSSIG; TOOKE.] WORKS BY WAGNER
1857
Beitrdge zur Lehre von den Banken, mit besonderer Riicksicht auf England. Leipzig: Voss. 1862 Die Geld- und Credittheorie der Peel'schen Bankacte. Vienna: Braumiiller. 1864 Die Gesetzmassigkeit in den scheinbar willkiihrlichen menschlichen Handlungen vom Standpunkte der Statistik. 2 vols. in 1. Hamburg: Boyes & Geisler. 1870a Die Abschaffung des privaten Grundeigenthums. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot. (1870fo) 1873 System der deutschen Zettelbankgesetzgebung. 2d ed. Freiburg im Breisgau: Wagner. (1871-1872) 1877-1901 Finanzwissenschaft. 4 vols. Leipzig and Heidelberg: Winter. -» First published as a revision of K. H. Rau's Lehrbuch der Finanzwissenschaft. Volume 1: Einleitung; Ordnung der Finanzwirthschaft; Finanzbedarf; Privatenverb. 3d ed., 1883. Volume 2: Theorie der Besteuerung; Gebiihrenlehre und allgemeine Steuerlehre. 2d ed., 1890. Volume 3:
432
WAITZ, THEODOR
SpecieHe Steuerlehre; Ergdnzungsheft: Die britische und franzosische Besteuerung. 2 vols. in 1. 1898., Volume 4: Specielle Steuerlehre; Die deutsche Besteuerung des 19. Jahrhunderts . . . Nachtrdge, 2 vols. 1899-1901. 1872 Rede iiber die soziale Frage. Berlin: Wiegandt & Griebe. -> For an abbreviated translation, see pages 489-506 in Social Reformers: Adam Smith to John Dewey, edited by Donald O. Wagner; published in 1935 by Macmillan. (1876) 1892-1894 Grundlegung der politischen Oekonomie. 2 vols. 3d ed. Lehr- und Handbuch der politischen Okonomie, Section 1. Leipzig: Winter. -> First published as a revision of K. H. Rau's Lehrbuch der politischen Okonomie under the title Allgemeine oder theoretische Volkswirtschaftslehre. 1881 Der Staat und das Versicherungswesen. Tubingen: Laupp. 1883 Uber Verstaatlichung der Eisenbahnen und iiber soziale Steuerreform: Zwei Landtagsreden. Berlin: Luckhardt. 1886 Systematische Nationalokonomie. Jahrbiicher fur N ationalokonomie und Statistik New Series 12:197252. -» For a partial translation, see "Wagner on the Present State of Political Economy," Volume 1, pages 113-133 of the Quarterly Journal of Economics. 1891 [A Book Review of] Marshall's Principles of Economics. Quarterly Journal of Economics 5:319-338. 1895 Vortrag gehalten am 29 Mdrz 1895 iiber Sozialismus, Sozialdemokratie, Katheder- und Staatssozialismus. Berlin: Vaterlandische Verlagsanstalt. 1900 Vom Territorialstaat zur Weltmacht. Berlin: Harrwitz. 1901a Wohnungsnot und stddtische Bodenfrage. Berlin: Harrwitz. (1901&) 1902 Agrar- und Industriestaat. 2d ed. Jena: Fischer. 1907-1909 Theoretische Sozialokonomik. 2 vols. Leipzig: Winter. 1911 Staat in nationalokonomischer Hinsicht. Volume 7, pages 727-739 in Handworterbuch der Staatswissenschaften. 3d ed. Jena: Fischer. 1912 Die Stromungen in der Sozialpolitik und der Katheder- und Staatssozialismus. Berlin: Volkstumliche Biicherei. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
BERCKENHAGEN, FRIEDRICH 1923 Die Lehre Ad. Wagners vom sozialpolitischen Zweck der Steuer und die Reichsfinanzreform von 1919-1920. Dissertation, Univ. of Konigsberg. BURGER, G. 1929 Adolph Wagner als Statistiker. Deutsches statistisches Zentralblatt Supplement no. 11. CLARK, EVALYN A. 1940 Adolph Wagner: From National Economist to National Socialist. Political Science Quarterly 55:398-411. MEITZEL, C. 1928 Adolph Wagner. Volume 7, pages 876-879 in Handworterbuch der Staatswissenschaften. 4th ed. Jena: Fischer. -» Contains a complete listing of Wagner's books and articles. NEUMANN, FRANZ LEOPOLD (1942) 1963 Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933-1944. 2d ed. New York: Octagon. OPPENHEIM, HEINRICH B. 1872 Der Kathedersozialismus. Berlin: Privately printed. OPPENHEIMER, FRANZ (1918) 1928 Adolph Wagner. Volume 2, pages 302-314 in Franz Oppenheimer, Gesammelte Reden und Aufsdtze. Munich: Hueber. RENDU, ANDRE 1910 La loi de Wagner et I'accroissement
des depenses dans les budgets modernes, Paris: Rousseau. SCHNEIDER, WALTER 1923 Adolph Wagner's Beziehungen zum Sozialismus. Dissertation, Univ. of Giessen. SCHONE, ERICH 1923 Adolf Wagners Anschauungen iiber die Statistik. Dissertation, Univ. of Halle. SCHUMACHER, H. 1928 Adolph Wagner. Pages 173-193 in Deutsches biographisches Jahrbuch. Volume 2: 1917-1920. Berlin: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt. THIER, ERICH 1930 Rodbertus, Lassalle, Adolph Wagner: Ein Beitrag zur Theorie und Geschichte des deutschen Staatssozialismus. Jena: Fischer. VLEUGELS, W. 1935 Adolph Wagner: Gedenkworte zur hundertsten Wiederkehr des Geburtstages eines deutschen Sozialisten. Schmollers Jahrbuch fur Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung und Volkswirtschaft im Deutschen Reiche 59:129-141.
WAITZ, THEODOR Theodor Waitz (1821-1864) was a German psychologist and anthropologist; his Anthropologie der Naturvolker (1859-1872) was the first comprehensive work on anthropology written in German. Waitz was born in Gotha, the son cf a clergyman who was also director of a seminary. This environment colored his work in philosophy and psychology; all his major works outside of anthropology extol religion as the greatest creation of the human mind. Yet Waitz's moralistic and idealistic bent was always restrained by a countervailing impetus toward empirical research. Waitz studied at the University of Leipzig, where he received his PH.D. at the age of 19. After travels to Paris and Rome, during which he worked on a critical edition of Aristotle's Organon, he joined the faculty of the University of Marburg in 1846 as a teacher of philosophy. His first published works were synthetic in character: thus, in his Grundlegung zur Psychologie (1846a) and in a textbook, Lehrbuch der Psychologie als Naturwissenschaft (1846£>), he sought to integrate the humanities with science. (To achieve this integration he had studied anatomy.) He was deeply impressed by the ideas of Herbart and believed that the principles of pedagogy would provide the scientific key for understanding the intellectual development not only of individuals but of mankind as well. His Allgemeine Pddagogik was published in 1852, four years after his promotion to extraordinary professor at Marburg. Just as Waitz had studied anatomy in order to be able to create a new psychology, so he sought to base a new philosophy and a new pedagogy on the study of world cultures. He therefore began to write the six-volume Anthropologie der Naturvolker, a survey of all that was known at that time about primitive peoples. In the first volume, Vber
WAITZ, THEODOR die Einheit des Menschengeschlechtes und den Naturzustand des Menschen (1859; "Concerning the Unity of Mankind and Man's Natural State"), he investigated the genesis of mankind in terms of "natural history" and "psychology." He fiercely attacked the notion that there are fundamental differences between the various races of man, a notion supported in Europe by Klemm and Gobineau and in the United States by Josiah Clark Nott and George R. Gliddon. Waitz's book contained some of the same conclusions that Darwin published, also in 1859, in the Origin of Species. (A similar book by Adolf Bastian, Der Mensch in der Geschichte, which appeared in 1860, showed no evidence that the author had any familiarity with Waitz's work.) In the few remaining years of his life, Waitz published the next three volumes, Die Negervolker und ihre Veru>andten (1860) and Die Amerikaner (which appeared in two volumes in 1862 and in 1864), but he wrote a draft of only the first part of the fifth volume, Die Malaien, before he died. This was completed (1865) by his disciple, the ethnologist G. Gerland, who added a second part, Die Mikronesier und nordwestlichen Polynesier (1870); Gerland also added a third part (which became the sixth volume) on the other South Seas peoples (1872). Together, these volumes constituted what for the time was an excellent compendium of ethnological material, and even today they can be consulted with profit since some of the material they contain is not otherwise readily available. It was in the first volume that Waitz sought to provide a theoretical formulation of the problems that preoccupied him. He began by asserting that human groups have a fundamental psychic unity and that they have become differentiated in the course of history. He believed that all human beings traverse essentially the same stages of psychic development but that environment and history determine when a particular group will reach a particular stage. Unlike the post-Darwinian social scientists, he was not able to visualize evolutionary stages that are alike for all mankind. Research into the "natural foundations of history," which Waitz considered to be the special province of anthropology, requires, in his view, primarily the study of nonliterate peoples. He called them Naturvolker, not because they live in a state of nature (which does not exist in any case) but because they seemed to be closest to that hypothetical state. Since these peoples have similar reactions to their physical environment, one may conclude that their mental abilities are the same. Waitz felt that the alleged unfimess for survival of many such peoples (for example, Polynesians, American Indians, and Australian aborigines) is
433
really due to their small numbers, to the harmful influences of Europeans, and the like. In every instance, the progress of civilization depends upon favorable or unfavorable circumstances rather than upon differences in intellectual ability. Long before the discovery of the Mendelian laws of heredity, Waitz asserted that races are not constant entities but are mutable, as are particular peoples and individuals. As noted above, he combated theories concerning the inequality of human races, such as Gobineau's and those expounded by Nott and Gliddon to justify Negro slavery in North America (1854). He ridiculed such notions as that a given cranial form persists absolutely for all time, that half-breed populations are inferior, and that cultural development depends on mental gifts that are "different" and fixed in a given population. He believed, instead, that cultural development depends on the level of education and the stage of civilization. Just as the physical appearance of a racial type may gradually change as a result of climate, diet, way of life, social conditions, and other aspects of culture, so also may the intellectual endowment of peoples. "A particular people can attain a high level of cultural development without adopting a large number of foreign traits from others, and by the same token it can survive the total decay of this level of culture" (1859— 1872, vol. 1, pp. 388 ff.). Waitz also pointed out that there are peoples on different cultural levels within the same race and that Naturvolker can be found among many different races. In refutation of Gustav Fechner he asserted that it is not thisworldly pleasures but rather work and abstention from pleasure that are the sole bases of higher civilization. Man is capable of extraordinary effort only when under severe pressure, and even intellectual effort is a means to a social end rather than an end in itself. Waitz's moralistic and idealistic orientation did not prevent him from doing strictly empirical work. Indeed, in contrast to the psychology of his time, which was dominated by Hegel's idealism and dialectically constructed stages, his was a proclamation of the pre-eminent importance of empiricism in psychology. He asserted that psychology, like the natural sciences, must explore causal relationships in the realm of the psyche. He also castigated traditional psychology for failing to study those interactions among individuals that shape the inner and outer life of human society. While he emphasized this sociological aspect of anthropological research, Waitz nevertheless believed that individual creative effort becomes increasingly prominent in human groups with the progress of culture.
434
WAKEFIELD, EDWARD GIBBON
three-year term of imprisonment, which he duly served in London's Newgate Prison between 1826 and 1829. Enforced leisure enabled Wakefield to compose his powerful Facts Relating to the Punishment of Death in the Metropolis (1831), a treatise along HERMANN BAUMANN Benthamite lines arguing that what deters crime is the certainty of apprehension, not the severity [For the historical context of Waltz's work, see RACE; of punishment. More important, his prison experiand the biography of GOBINEAU.] ence set Wakefield to speculating, initially about WORKS BY WAITZ his own emigration from England and subse(1846a) 1878 Grundlegung zur Psychologie. 2d ed. Leipquently about the whole subject of colonization. zig: Siegismund. His Letter from Sydney (1829), published anony1846b Lehrbuch der Psychologie als Naturwissenschaft. Brunswick (Germany): Vieweg. mously at the end of his prison sentence, purported (1852) 1910 Allgemeine Pddagogik. 2d ed., rev. Langento be an actual communication from an English salza (Germany): Gressler. emigrant in Australia. Although Wakefield had not 1859-1872 Anthropologie der Naturvolker. 6 vols. Leipvisited Australia, his tone was sufficiently plausible zig : Fleischer. -> Volume 1: Uber die Einheit des and the contents sufficiently detailed to win the Menschengeschlechtes und den Naturzustand des Menschen, 1859. Volume 2: Die Negervolker und ihre book some celebrity. Wakefield's View of the Art of Verwandten, 1860. Volumes 3-4: Die Amerikaner, Colonization (1849) was a longer and more polem1862-1864. Volumes 5-6: Die Volker der Siidsee. ical work, but A Letter from Sydney contained the Part 1: Die Malaien, 1865. Part 2: Die Mikronesier essential features of the Wakefield system of colund nordwestlichen Polynesier, by Georg Gerland, 1870. Part 3: Die Polynesier, Melanesier, Australier onization. In it, he argued that the three correct und Tasmanier, by Georg Gerland, 1872. principles governing new settlement were, first, the Theodor Waitz' Allgemeine Padagogik und kleinere pddatermination of free grants of land and the setting gogische Schriften. Langensalza (Germany): Beyer & of a "sufficient price" on unoccupied territory; secMann, 1910. -» Contains, in addition to the Allgemeine Pddagogik (1852), articles first published between ond, the use of the sales proceeds to finance the 1848 and 1858. movement of voluntary settlers, properly distributed by sex, age, and skill, to new colonies; and SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY third, the grant of self-government once colonial EICH, I. 1925 Theodor Waitz' Anthropologie der Naturvolker. Dissertation, Univ. of Bonn. population reached fifty thousand. GEBHARDT, OTTO 1906 Theodor Waitzs pddagogische As a theorist of population, emigration, and colGrundanschauungen in ihrem Verhdltnis zu seiner onization, Wakefield displayed considerable powers Psychologie, Ethik, Anthropologie und Personlichkeit. of originality and exposition. Indeed, he appears to Langensalza (Germany): Beyer & Mann. have anticipated two key theoretical concepts NOTT, JOSIAH C.; and GLIDDON, GEORGE R. 1854 Types of Mankind: Or, Ethnological Researches. . . . Philadelmuch in vogue among nineteenth-century students phia: Lippincott. of economic development—the strategic signifiSTROIA, IEAN 1894 Theodor Waitzs System der Erziehcance of social overhead capital and the desiraung. Jena (Germany): Hermannstadt Archdiocesanbility of balanced economic growth. The original Buchdruckerei. edition of Mill's Principles of Political Economy (1848) quoted Wakefield as the recognized authority on colonization, and the 1852 edition cited emiWAKEFIELD, EDWARD GIBBON gration from Ireland in the wake of the potato famine as a grim demonstration of the accuracy of Edward Gibbon Wakefield (1796-1862), an expert on colonization, was born in London. He Wakefield's analysis. attended Westminster School between 1808 and If anything, Wakefield was still more successful 1810 and a secondary school in Edinburgh from as a colonial organizer than he was as a theorist. 1810 to 1812, exhibiting in both institutions The South Australia Association was founded in "signs of an intractable disposition" (Carlyle 1834 to promote Wakefield's views, and after the 1899). When he failed in a brief try at diplomacy society had won the support of the duke of Weland his first marriage was terminated by his wife's lington, Parliament in the same year passed legisdeath, Wakefield endeavored to repair his fortunes lation that included provisions for the sale of land by tricking a schoolgirl heiress into marriage. Her at a fixed price of five shillings per acre and for infuriated relatives succeeded in annulling the the use of the proceeds to subsidize the movement union and in having Wakefield punished with a of English settlers to South Australia. In 1838 If one is fully to understand Waltz's thought, one must always bear in mind that he wrote his Anthropologie as a foundation for pedagogy, his principal concern—to demonstrate the capacity of socially conditioned human beings for education.
WALD, ABRAHAM Wakefield accompanied Lord Durham to Canada and had a large share in the writing of Durham's famous Report on the Affairs of British North America, the basis of Canadian advance to selfgovernment. In the 1840s Wakefield played an active role in the colonization of New Zealand. Between 1852 and 1854 he served as a highly influential adviser to the government of the young colony. The last years of his life, marred by illness, Wakefield spent in retirement. ROBERT LEKACHMAN [See also CAPITAL, SOCIAL OVERHEAD.] WORKS BY WAKEFIELD
(1829) 1929 A Letter From Sydney, the Principal Town of Australasia, & Other Writings on Colonization. London and Toronto: Dent; New York: Button. (1831) 1832 Facts Relating to the Punishment of Death in the Metropolis; With an Appendix, Concerning Murder for the Sale of the Dead Body. 2d ed. London: Wilson. (1849) 1914 A View of the Art of Colonization: In Letters Between a Statesman and a Colonist. Oxford: Clarendon. SUPPLEMENTARY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BLOOMFIELD, PAUL 1961 Edward Gibbon Wakefield: Builder of the British Commonwealth. London: Longmans. CARLYLE, EDWARD I. (1899) 1938 Edward Gibbon Wakefield (1796-1862). Volume 20, pages 449-452 in Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford Univ. Press. MILL, JOHN STUART (1848) 1961 Principles of Political Economy. New ed. Edited by W. J. Ashley. New York: Kelley.
WALD, ABRAHAM Abraham Wald (1902-1950) was a mathematical statistician and a geometer. Given the fashions of this century, his fame as a statistician is by far the greater. Mathematical statistics Wald's interest in mathematical statistics became primary around 1938 and continued without interruption until his death. At ease in mathematical analysis, Wald contributed to the solutions of many of the specialized statistical problems of that period (see Wolfowitz 1952). However, it is with two broad lines of statistical research that his name is always linked: statistical decision theory and sequential analysis. Statistical decision theory. By 1938 there was available a considerable body of theory dealing with the relationship between observable data and
435
decision making, resulting from work along two closely related lines. One line dealt with the estimation problem—the problem of forming, from observable sample data, estimates, which are in some sense "best," of characteristics of populations described by probability distributions. The other line began with hypotheses concerning these probability distributions and sought "best" tests, based on observable sample data, of these hypotheses. In these two lines of research, R. A. Fisher, J. Neyman, and E. S. Pearson, all working in England, were particularly prominent. Both of these developments can, of course, be viewed as branches of the more general problem of making decisions in the face of uncertainty, and others must have thought of them as such. But it was Wald who first formally dealt with them in this way. As early as 1939, in one of his first papers (and possibly his finest) in mathematical statistics, Wald introduced a general mathematical structure for (single-sample) decision making, sufficiently general to include both estimation (point and interval) and hypothesis testing. He introduced such fundamental concepts as the multiple decision space and weight and risk functions, and for one of the solutions of the decision problem he introduced the principle of minimization of maximum risk. (There is currently some difference of opinion as to the dependence, in this last area, of Wald's work on von Neumann's great paper of 1928.) Such concepts as the least favorable a priori distribution and admissible regions are also found in this first paper. Wald continued his broad analysis of the decision problem, with a long interruption during the war, and it slowly but steadily gained acceptance. His work culminated in his formal and very general Statistical Decision Functions (1950), which incorporates his earlier researches into Bayes' and minimax solutions, as well as his later researches on complete classes of decision functions. The important connection between the decision problem and the zero-sum twoperson game is also described at length in this book. Wald continued his work on decision theory in the short time he lived after the publication of his book, his research centering on the role of randomization in the decision process. His total work in decision theory is probably his most important contribution to mathematical statistics. Sequential analysis. Wald's second major achievement in mathematical statistics is sequential analysis. The notion that in some sense it is economical to observe and analyze data sequentially, rather than to observe and analyze a single
436
WALD, ABRAHAM
sample of predetermined fixed size, was not a new one. Intuitive support for this notion is immediate; if the evidence shown in sequentially unfolding data is sharply one-sided, it seems reasonable to believe that the inquiry can be terminated early, with lengthier inquiries reserved for those situations in which the issue at hand appears, via the sequentially unfolding data, to be in greater doubt. This notion and the partial mathematical formulation of it were to be found in the statistical literature; among those who dealt with it before Wald was Walter Bartky of Chicago, and among Wald's contemporaries, George Barnard, working in England. But again it was Wald, in 1943, who first formulated mathematically and solved quite generally the problem of sequential tests of statistical hypotheses. He introduced the particular method of the sequential probability ratio test and, with Wolfowitz (1948), showed its optimal properties. He found operating characteristic and average sample number functions; he introduced, if he did not completely solve, the problem of sequential tests of composite hypotheses (utilizing weight functions); and he began vital discussions of such basic topics as multivalued decisions and optimal sequential estimation. All this, plus many special problems, were gathered together in Sequential Analysis (1947), a book surprisingly easy to read, less formal and more elementary in structure than his work on decision functions. Influence on statistical research. Wald's strictly mathematical approach to problems had heavy impact on American research in statistical theory. Up to 1939, one finds excellent researches in statistical theory that nevertheless sometimes lack a firm mathematical basis. Wald's approach was different: his formulations of decision theory and sequential tests of hypotheses were strictly mathematical. Wald can be associated with the beginning of a separation, continuing through the present, of American statistical research from (the parent) British statistical research. With notable exceptions, of course, current issues of Biometrika (a leading British statistical journal) and of the Annals of Mathematical Statistics (a journal of predominantly American authorship) will show at a glance the difference between the more formal, more mathematical American school—largely inspired and to some extent trained by Wald—and the more intuitive, more applied, less mathematical British school—influenced by such statistical innovators as Fisher, who were less impressed by the value of formal mathematical structure. A second consequence of Wald's modus operandi is notable. Up to 1939, theoretical statisticians
were primarily interested in rather limited problems. Wald's formulation of problems was often so broad that his work was difficult to read, but in setting out problems in broad terms, he greatly facilitated later research by others. For example, research in such difficult areas as sequential tests of composite hypotheses was much facilitated by Wald's extensive outline, however incomplete, of this area in his general formulation of sequential theory. Wald was at heart a mathematician. Although he was not openly opposed to intuitive justification or to popularization, he had no serious interest in either and he asserted that such activities, in the absence of or as substitutes for logical structure, are not permanently useful. Nevertheless, Part 1 of Wald's first full-scale report of his researches in sequential analysis (see Columbia. . . 1943) includes numerous heuristic and intuitive arguments and justifications of the sequential idea and of approximate formulas for risks of error, many of them originated by Wald himself. These surely help the reader understand, in a nonmathematical way, the nature of this new development; but they do not seem quite in the character of Wald. All this changes in Part 2, where Wald introduced cylindric random variables and abruptly tackled the difficult mathematical problem at hand (see Columbia. . . 1945). Wald's attitude toward specialized application was similar. He was always willing to help practical statisticians; and although his improvisations, approximations, guesses, and ad hoc solutions did not generally match the quality of his formal work, he nevertheless offered them freely. Yet his interest in such areas was casual. With respect to the originality of his contributions to mathematical statistics, Wald is in a class with Fisher and Neyman. But of all workers in this field Wald combined best a profound understanding of the value of the precise formulation of broad and significant areas of statistical inference with the mathematical equipment to handle them. His ability to recognize a major statistical area when he saw one and to do something about it was impressive. Were he alive today, he might well be able to formulate the Bayesian inference problem in such a way that its mathematical structure and its consequences would be clearly set apart from the philosophical and intuitive controversy which no amount of mathematics can ever settle. Work in geometry and other fields Wald's other major contribution was in geometry. Far closer than mathematical statistics to the
WALD, ABRAHAM core of mathematics itself, Wald's work here may someday be regarded as his major achievement. At present it is hardly known. Wald went to Vienna briefly in 1927, permanently in 1930; during the period 1931-1936 he worked in geometry with Karl Menger. His major work centered on the problem of the curvature of surfaces. He wrote on many topics in topology and metric spaces, measure and set theory, and lattice theory; and he was the first to prove the existence of a collective in probability theory. His activity in this area had ended by 1943—in fact, there was little after 1936. Wald also did important work in econometrics and mathematical economics. From 1932 to 1937 and, sporadically, later, he made valuable contributions to such diverse subjects as seasonal corrections to time series, approximate formulas for economic index numbers, indifference surfaces, the existence and uniqueness of solutions of extended forms of the Walrasian system of equations of production, the Cournot duopoly problem, and finally, in his much-used work written with Mann (1943), stochastic difference equations. By all odds, the most important of these were the papers on the existence of a solution to the competitive economic model, written in 1935 and 1936 for Menger's colloquium; an expository version, published in 1936, was translated in the October 1951 issue of Econometrica. These papers, along with von Neumann's slightly earlier oral discussion using Brouwer's fixed-point theorem, are the first in which a competitive existence theorem is rigorously proved. Some of Wald's conditions would be deemed overly strong today, but it was a pioneering accomplishment to have provided such a rigorous proof—some 26 years before Uzawa's demonstration of the equivalence of Wald's existence theorem and the fixed-point theorem. This paper alone guarantees Wald's permanent fame in economics. Intellectual career Wald was a superb teacher. There were no gimmicks or jokes—only precision and clarity. Sometimes, as Wolfowitz has noted (1952), the precision was labored, for Wald was generally content with any solid proof and seldom went to the trouble of searching for briefer and more elegant proofs. But his lectures were effective. The present author was the only student in a course of Wald's in the early days of sequential analysis, and with care and skill Wald taught him the content of his "green book" (see Columbia . . . 1943; the contents of this book were classified by the U.S. government until after the war). Wald was not often
437
electrifying, but his admirable teaching during the 1940s still helps to sustain statistical research and teaching. The notebooks (194?; 1941; 1946) created by his students from his lectures are testimony to the quality of Wald's instruction; they are rigorous at the level Wald had in mind, and they remain, some 25 years after their appearance, useful and even provocative for the modern teacher and student. In Wald's case, more than in the case of most, the work and the man were the same; he lived his work, and his happiest hours were devoted to it. It could have been Wald who said, "Let's go down to the beach and prove some theorems." Wald was born in 1902, in Cluj, Rumania. After private schooling and self-schooling (the consequence of complications arising from his family's Jewish orthodoxy), Wald, well-trained in mathematics, finally settled in Vienna in 1930. Soon after, he worked for five years in geometry under Menger. In 1932 he began five years of work in econometrics and mathematical economics at the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research. In 1938, the year of the Anschluss, Wald accepted an invitation—one which probably saved his life— from the Cowles Commission to do econometric research in the United States. Later in 1938 he was brought by Harold Hotelling to Columbia to work in mathematical statistics, and he remained there for the rest of his life. While on a lecture tour of India in 1950, he died in an airplane crash. Wald was a quiet and gentle man, deeply immersed in his work. He was fairly aloof from small talk, and he had few hobbies. But he was not indifferent to recognition; in the controversies that occasionally developed in the hyperactive and hypersensitive wartime atmosphere of Columbia's Statistical Research Group (of which Hotelling was official investigator and of which W. Allen Wallis was director of research), Wald displayed an entirely normal combination of passive distaste for dispute and active interest in the handling of his work. Apart from the pleasure he took in his work, Wald had a reasonable share of joy during his life. His marriage to Lucille Lang, who perished with him in India, and his two children, Betty and Robert, were sources of happiness to him. He also had his full share of sorrows, chief among them the death of eight of the nine European members of his immediate family in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. The scholars whose professional lives were most closely related to Wald's include Harold Hotelling
438
WALKER, FRANCIS A.
at the University of North Carolina and J. Wolfowitz at Cornell. Hotelling, himself one of the most distinguished figures in American statistical research, brought Wald to Columbia in 1938, securing for him a Carnegie fellowship and an assistant professorship, and helped him through a difficult period of adjustment. However, although Wald's early interest in certain areas of mathematical statistics was initiated by problems brought to his attention by Hotelling, they did not work together; their approach to problems, as well as the kind of problems that interested them, was somewhat different. In particular, Hotelling's interdisciplinary interests contrasted with Wald's strictly statistical interests. But they had great respect for each other, and Hotelling played a major role in Wald's career. Wolfowitz was Wald's leading student. Oriented mathematically almost exactly as Wald was, Wolfowitz wrote no fewer than 15 papers with Wald and was his closest friend. It is nearer to the truth to say that it was the team of Wald and Wolfowitz —rather than Wald alone—that gave much of American statistical inference the rather severe mathematical character it has today, though this is not to imply that either would be in sympathy with mathematically difficult work divorced from statistical reality. HAROLD FREEMAN [For the context of Wald's work, see ESTIMATION; GAME THEORY; HYPOTHESIS TESTING. For discussion of the subsequent development of Wald's ideas, see DECISION THEORY; SEQUENTIAL ANALYSIS.] BIBLIOGRAPHY For an account of Wald's many specialized contributions to mathematical statistics, see Wolfowitz 1952. For comment on his early contribution to probability, see Menger 1952; von Mises 1946. Discussions of his contributions to mathematical economics and econometrics are found in Morgenstern 1951; Tintner 1952. His major work in statistical decision theory is in Wald 1950. For his major work in sequential analysis, see Wald 1947. For a commentary on his work in geometry, see Menger 1952. A bibliography of Wald's published work is contained in Selected Papers . . . 1955. For lecture notes compiled by his students, see Wald 194?; 1941; 1946. WORKS BY WALD (1936) 1951 On Some Systems of Equations of Mathematical Economics. Econometrica 19:368-403. -» First published in German in Volume 7 of Zeitschrift fur Nationalokonomie. (1939) 1955 Contributions to the Theory of Statistical Estimation and Testing Hypotheses. Pages 87-114 in Abraham Wald, Selected Papers in Statistics and Probability. New York: McGraw-Hill. -> First published in Volume 10 of the Annals of Mathematical Statistics. 194? Notes on the Theory of Statistical Estimation and of Testing Hypotheses. Notes prepared by Ralph J. Brookner. Unpublished manuscript. -» Lectures given
in a one-semester course at Columbia University, and available in the Columbia University Libraries. 1941 Lectures on the Analysis of Variance and Covariance. Notes prepared by Ralph J. Brookner. Unpublished manuscript. -> Lectures given in 1941 at Columbia University, and available in the Columbia University Libraries. 1943 WALD, ABRAHAM; and MANN, H. B. On the Statistical Treatment of Linear Stochastic Difference Equations. Econometrica 11:173-220. 1943 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, STATISTICAL RESEARCH GROUP Sequential Analysis of Statistical Data: Theory. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. 1945 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, STATISTICAL RESEARCH GROUP Sequential Analysis of Statistical Data: Applications. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. 1946 Notes on the Efficient Design of Experimental Investigation. Unpublished manuscript. -> Lecture notes of a one-semester course given in 1943 at Columbia University, and available in the Columbia University Libraries. 1947 Sequential Analysis. New York: Wiley. (1948) 1955 WALD, ABRAHAM; and WOLFOWITZ, J. Optimum Character of the Sequential Probability Ratio Test. Pages 521-534 in Abraham Wald, Selected Papers in Statistics and Probability. New York: McGrawHill. -> First published in Volume 19 of the Annals of Mathematical Statistics. (1950) 1964 Statistical Decision Functions. New York: Wiley. Selected Papers in Statistics and Probability. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955. -> Published posthumously. Contains writings first published between 1938 and 1952, and a bibliography of Wald's works on pages 20-24. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY HOTELLING, H. 1951 Abraham Wald. American Statistician 5:18-19. MENGER, K. 1952 The Formative Years of Abraham Wald and His Work in Geometry. Annals of Mathematical Statistics 23:14-20. MORGENSTERN, OSKAR 1951 Abraham Wald: 1902-1950. Econometrica 19:361-367. TINTNER, G. 1952 Abraham Wald's Contributions to Econometrics. Annals of Mathematical Statistics 23: 21-28. VON MISES, RICHARD (1946) 1964 Mathematical Theory of Probability and Statistics. Edited and augmented by Hilda Geiringer. New York: Academic Press. WOLFOWITZ, J. 1952 Abraham Wald: 1902-1950. Annals of Mathematical Statistics 23:1-13.
WALKER, FRANCIS A. Francis Amasa Walker (1840-1897), American economist and statistician, was born in Boston, the offspring of an old New England family. His father, Amasa Walker, a prominent manufacturer, retired from business the year of his son's birth and devoted the remainder of his life to public service and economic studies, becoming the outstanding American economist of his time, a distinction later assumed by his son. Walker attended Amherst College and subse-
WALKER, FRANCIS A. quently served in the Civil War; less than five years after graduation he was brevetted brigadier general. After the war he was called to Washington as chief of the bureau of statistics in the Treasury Department. He proved to be an administrator of great ability and was appointed superintendent of the censuses of 1870 and 1880. In these positions he acquitted himself with great distinction. Doing such work also provided him with the opportunity of becoming acquainted with a huge mass of statistical data relating to the economy of the United States. Guided by his father, Walker studied economics and in 1872 was appointed professor of political economy and history at Yale's Sheffield Scientific School. The decade which followed was one of unusual literary productivity. In 1876 Walker published The Wages Question; in 1878 a long discussion entitled Money; in 1879 a briefer one, Money in Its Relations to Trade and Industry; in 1883 both Land and Its Rent and a full-length textbook, Political Economy. Meanwhile, in 1881, Walker had been appointed president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and in this post again proved to be an able administrator. In spite of the pressure of new duties, Walker's interest in economics continued. He became the leader of the profession, serving as president of the long-established American Statistical Association from 1883 to 1896 and helping the new and at the time controversial American Economic Association on its way by serving as its first president from 1886 to 1892. In addition, he held a large number of public offices, ranging from membership on the New Haven Board of Education, where he favored the discontinuation of religious exercises in public schools, to an appointment as U.S. commissioner to the International Monetary Conference, which convened at Paris in 1878. He took a stand on many public issues, including parochial schools and the "new immigration," both of which he opposed. In politics he was a Republican but turned "mugwump" in 1884 and voted for Grover Cleveland. Walker's economic views differed from those of earlier American economists in a number of important respects. He considered economics a science rather than an art, concerned with principles rather than precepts. Economists, he said, ought "to teach and not to preach" (1899a). Walker also refused to adhere to the opinion dear to many protectionists that economics should be developed in the form of a "national political economy" that would lend itself to immediate application to practical politics. He was not a dogmatic
439
exponent of laissez-faire; rather, he recognized the existence of economic conflicts of various sorts and referred to instances of "imperfect competition" calling for the intervention of the government. In the field of distribution Walker generalized Ricardo's concept of differential rent and applied it to the earnings of entrepreneurs. Wages appeared to him as a residual share left over after the product had been diminished by rent, interest, and profit. This over-all theory of distribution did not win many adherents. It placed a ceiling on the earnings of labor no less effectively than that imposed by the old wages-fund doctrine, according to which wages are the quotient of the employers' "wages fund" divided by the number of workers. This doctrine Walker demolished with lasting effect by making wages a function of the product, and it is for this contribution that he is remembered best in the history of economic thought. Walker's views of monetary questions were given forceful expression in International Bimetallism (1896). In the face of a gold supply that was inadequate relative to the growth of the world economy, Walker strongly urged the international monetization of silver. In the field of statistics Walker was a pioneer in supplementing tabular presentation with graphic material, sometimes shown in color. The Statistical Atlas of the United States, published under his editorship in 1874, set new standards for official statistical publications. The rise of statistics as an increasingly important field of professional specialization was in no small measure due to Walker's influence in the academic world as well as to his efforts aiming at the establishment of a permanent staff for the census. As a publicist who could count on a wide audience he made the public aware of the importance of adequate statistical data. Here as well as in his other pursuits he was also a leading figure in the international field. HENRY W. SPIEGEL [See also RENT; WAGES, article on THEORY.] WORKS BY WALKER
(1876) 1904 The Wages Question: A Treatise on Wages and the Wages Class. New York: Holt. (1878) 1891 Money. New York: Holt. (1879) 1907 Money in Its Relations to Trade and Industry. New York: Holt. (1883a) 1891 Land and Its Rent. Boston: Little. (1883fo) 1888 Political Economy. 3d ed., rev. & enl. New York: Holt. 1896 International Bimetallism. New York: Holt. 1899a Discussions in Economics and Statistics. 2 vols. New York: Holt. -> Volume 1: Finance and Taxation, Money and Bimetallism, Economic Theory. Volume 2:
440
WALLAS, GRAHAM
Statistics, Natural Growth, Social Economics. Published posthumously. 1899& Discussions in Education. New York: Holt. ~» Published posthumously. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
DEWEY, DAVIS R. 1934 Walker, Francis Amasa. Volume 15, pages 323-324 in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences. New York: Macmillan. DORFMAN, JOSEPH 1949 General Francis A. Walker: Revisionist. Volume 3, pages 101-110 in Joseph Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Civilization. New York: Viking. DUNBAR, CHARLES F. 1897 The Career of Francis Amasa Walker. Quarterly Journal of Economics 11:436-448. -> Originally published in the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. FITZPATRICK, PAUL J. 1957 Leading American Statisticians in the Nineteenth Century. Journal of the American Statistical Association 52:301-321. FITZPATRICK, PAUL J. 1962 The Development of Graphic Presentation of Statistical Data in the United States. Social Science 37:203-214. HUTCHISON, T. W. (1953) 1962 A Review of Economic Doctrines, 1870-1929. Oxford: Clarendon. LAUGHLIN, J. LAURENCE 1897 Francis Amasa Walker. Journal of Political Economy 5:228-236. MUNROE, JAMES P. 1923 A Life of Francis Amasa Walker. New York: Holt. -> Includes a bibliography of Walker's writings and addresses. SPIEGEL, HENRY W. 1960 Francis A. Walker. Pages 143153 in Henry W. Spiegel (editor), The Rise of American Economic Thought. Philadelphia: Chilton. TAUSSIG, FRANK W. (1896) 1932 Wages and Capital: An Examination of the Wages Fund Doctrine. London School of Economics and Political Science. WRIGHT, CARROLL D. 1897 Francis Amasa Walker. Journal of the American Statistical Association 5:245— 290. -» A bibliography of Walker's writings and addresses appears on pages 276-290.
WALLAS, GRAHAM Graham Wallas (1858-1932) was a British political scientist, sociologist, and socialist. As Sidney Webb noted at the time of Wallas' death, "[his] genius was for dealing with persons and their relations." Webb also mentioned an apt remark by Alfred Zimmern that "Mr. and Mrs. Webb are interested in town councils; Graham Wallas is interested in town councillors." In an era when others were mainly interested in the operations of laws and institutions, Wallas dealt with the human side of political problems and dealt with it as a socialist and nonconformist who believed fervently in equality. The five books and numerous articles he wrote were immensely influential in his day, and some of them still deservedly enjoy a wide readership. Wallas' socialism was joined to a lifelong suspicion of "those in authority," a suspicion that surely owed something to his early family experience. He
was born in the district of Bishopwearmouth South, county of Sunderland, and was the fifth of nine children. His father, Gilbert Innes Wallas, was a clergyman who later served as vicar of Barnstaple, Devon; his mother, Frances Talbot Peacock Wallas, came from a relatively well-to-do family. The family was in comfortable circumstances, but the Reverend Mr. Wallas was puritanical in manner and a strict father in most respects. His son, consequently, became increasingly rebellious when he was still quite young, and he was probably glad to leave home, in 1871, for the Shrewsbury School, where he remained for six years. When he was 19 years old, Wallas entered Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Graduating in 1881 with a second-class honors degree in greats, he obtained a position as schoolmaster in classics at The Philberds, a preparatory school for boys. In 1884 he was appointed classics master at Highgate School but was dismissed after two terms "on a question of religious conformity"—for refusing to take communion. In the years that followed he taught at Sussex House School in Streatham and elsewhere, but his interest in preparatory-school teaching as a career declined sharply after his dismissal from Highgate. It is possible that his refusal to take communion was motivated, consciously or unconsciously, by a desire to assert his independence from his father. His father, at any rate, was opposed to his son's action, and relations between them were not close during the remaining five years of Gilbert Wallas' life. The period between Highgate and his father's death must have been a difficult one for Wallas. His mother's death in 1885 was followed, two years later, by the death of his brother, George. These deaths were surely a severe trial, but Wallas, never one to parade his emotions, gave few outward signs of distress. In 1886 Wallas joined the Fabian Society, founded three years earlier, and in 1888 he was elected to its executive committee, serving with Annie Besant, Hubert Bland, William Clarke, Sydney Olivier, Bernard Shaw, and Sidney Webb. The famous Fabian Essays in Socialism (published in 1889) were written by the members of the executive committee, and much to the surprise of Wallas and the others, the Essays were an immediate success. The first thousand copies were sold within a month, and 25,000 copies were purchased in the first year after publication (Cole 1961, pp. 24-25). Wallas' essay, "Property Under Socialism," was not one of his best efforts and is one of the less successful in the collection. The Fabians never
WALLAS, GRAHAM formulated clear ideas about the proper division between public or state-owned enterprise and private property; when pressed, they were inclined to favor expanding the public sector, though they understood only dimly the resulting problems of organization and management. Few among them were skilled in rigorous economic analysis, and Wallas, who was certainly not an expert, shared their characteristic vagueness in discussing technical economic problems. His essay achieved distinction only when he dealt with the humane and aesthetic aspects of socialism. Toward the end of the essay he observed, If this generation were wise, it would spend on education not only more than any other generation has ever spent before, but more than any generation would ever need to spend again. It would fill the school buildings with the means not only of comfort, but even of the higher luxury; it would serve the associated meals on tables spread with flowers, in halls surrounded with beautiful pictures, or even, as John Milton proposed, filled with the sound of music; it would seriously propose to itself the ideal of Ibsen, that every child should be brought up as a nobleman. Unfortunately, this generation is not wise. ([1889] 1908, pp. 133-134) Wallas resigned from the executive committee of the Fabian Society in 1895, and in 1904 he resigned from the society itself. He had long been impatient with the interminable discussions of his Fabian colleagues, and he strongly objected to a number of their ideas. Although his separation from the society was precipitated by a pamphlet of Shaw's that was, on balance, critical of free trade, it is clear that Wallas had been unhappy for some time prior to his resignation. Years later he asserted that Elie Halevy's Imperialism and the Rise of Labour, the fifth volume of his History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century, contains the only accurate account of his resignation from the society, and Halevy's account makes it apparent that Wallas was dissatisfied with more than the free-trade issue. Halevy described the Fabian Society in the early years of this century as follows: During the three transitional years which followed the end of the Boer War [the Society] presented a bizarre spectacle. It published a tract on the tariff question in which the writers . . . seemed to reserve their bitterest sarcasm for the doctrine of free trade. At the weekly meetings of the Society, Hewins openly defended tariff reform, as advocated by Chamberlain; Hubert Bland spoke about Kipling; Benjamin Kidd developed the principles of his anti-intellectualist psychology and his imperialist philosophy of history; Cecil Chesterton laid 'Gladstonian ghosts.' Graham Wallas, one of the founders, left the Society . . . [as] he felt
4 41
himself compromised by the deliberately anti-Liberal attitudes the heads of the Fabian Society had adopted. (1926, p. 366) Shortly after the publication of the Fabian Essays Wallas became a university extension lecturer, and in 1895 he was appointed lecturer in the London School of Economics and Political Science. In 1894 he became a member of the London School Board. Three years later, when he was almost forty, he married Ada Radford. One year younger than her husband, she was from a respected family in Devonshire, and one of her books, Daguerrotypes, published in 1929, is an affectionate memoir of her girlhood in Victorian England. The Wallas' only child, May Graham Wallas, was born in 1898. Wallas became a member of the London County Council in 1904, a position he held until 1907; he also served on its Technical Education Board and Education Committee. In 1912 he was appointed a member of the Royal Commission on the Civil Service, serving until 1915, and in 1914 he became professor of political science at the University of London. He received at least two honorary degrees, from Manchester in 1922 and Oxford in 1931. In 1928 he became honorary president of Morley College for Working Men and Women. Wallas lectured in the United States on several occasions, including a lecture series at Harvard in 1910, the Lowell lectures in Boston just before the outbreak of World War i, lectures at Williams College in 1928, and the Dodge lectures at Yale in 1919. He expressed his distaste for the Palmer raids and general anticommunist hysteria that pervaded the American political scene following World War I in an article in the Atlantic Monthly (1920), in which he deplored especially the current treatment of radical minorities. The price of intolerance, he argued, is to force reliance on existing economic and political expedients to solve problems when, in fact, new solutions must be found for difficulties ranging from noisy factories and streets to the transformation of human relationships as a consequence of technological change. Contributions to political thought Wallas' five books reflect the fact that he was a slow and careful writer whose books first took form in lectures, delivered in and out of the classroom; even after that, he wrote several drafts of a work before submitting it for publication. Thus, The Life of Francis Place, published in 1898, required at least six years of research and writing. The first draft of Human Nature in Politics was written in 1899, but it was not until 1908 that the book was published. The rest of his books appeared at rela-
44*2
WALLAS, GRAHAM
tively long intervals: The Great Society in 1914, Our Social Heritage in 1921, and The Art of Thought in 1926. When he died at Portloe, Cornwall, in 1932, aged 74, he was at work on a sixth book, but it was never published. The Life of Francis Place is an important contribution to English social history of the early nineteenth century, especially the history of reform. A friend of James Mill and other notables of the day, Place was for a time a utilitarian, a Malthusian to a point, a supporter of trade unions, a devout believer in freedom of speech and discussion, an advocate of parliamentary reform, and an enthusiastic advocate.of the repeal of the Corn Laws. Wallas not only generally accepted Place's views, but he also identified with Place's role as an influential figure who remained in the background. In his second and most important book, Human Nature in Politics, Wallas presented a psychodynamic approach to politics that was unique at this time. The work was not only highly original, but it had also a strong impact on political science. As Harold Laski later commented, Human Nature "wrought something like a revolution in the methodology of political discussion, both in England and America. It was the first time that democracy had been discussed by a man amply acquainted with psychological research; its freshness, its humour, its almost uncanny power of realistic insight, gave a new and profound stimulus to scientific thinking" (see Graham Wallas, 18581932, p. 11). Introducing his book with a plea that students of politics pay more attention to "the facts of human nature," Wallas warned against too much reliance on "intellectualism," that is, the tendency to think of politics as based on rational calculation. Such an "intellectualist" assumption, Wallas noted, has led politicians and scholars alike to the erroneous conclusion that electoral choices are based on enlightened self-interest instead of, as frequently happens, on chance, prejudice, a transient emotion, or a dim association, not even fully conscious, from the past. He recalled, as one illustration, that in Philadelphia he was once shown a ballot listing four hundred names, from which the voter was supposed to make an intelligent selection of candidates. Political action, national and international, Wallas cautioned, owes much to "personal affection, fear, ridicule, the desire for property, etc." In a summary of his chapter titled "Non-Rational Inference in Politics," Wallas noted, in language still fresh, that "many of the half-conscious processes by which men form their political opinions
are non-rational. . . . The empirical art of politics consists largely in the creation of opinion by the deliberate exploitation of subconscious non-rational inference" (1908, p. 18). These lines, suggestive of the later work of Walter Lippmann, Harold D. Lass well, and others, were probably written at the turn of the century. Yet Wallas was no despairing rationalist, nor was he cynical about the possibilities of applying social intelligence to the solution of pressing problems. If war and inequality are to be abolished, he insisted, man must make every effort to substitute thoughtful choice of ends and calculation of means for blind, ignorant emotion. The best use of reason and instinct, he argued, following Plato as well as Freud, is to achieve a "harmony" of emotions that, no longer warring among themselves, can be concentrated "on an end discovered by the intellect" (1908, p. 204). In The Great Society, which was dedicated to Lippmann, Wallas built on themes introduced earlier in Human Nature and Politics. By the term "great society" he meant not the modern welfare state (or the vision of America promulgated by President Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s) but the modern industrial society, with its centralization of power, its crowd psychology, the everincreasing interdependence of different segments of its population (as a consequence of division of labor, specialization, the concentration of population in urban centers, etc.), and its impersonal social life. While Wallas never used the word "alienation," he felt keenly that the modern state deprives people of intimacy and initiative; that although it provides them with security, paradoxically it makes happiness more difficult to attain. Wallas offered no solution to this problem; he merely expressed his nostalgia for a world that seemed to be fast disappearing everywhere in the West—and that may, indeed, never have existed. "If," he wrote, "I try to make for myself a visual picture of the social system which I should desire for England and America, there comes before me a recollection of those Norwegian towns and villages where everyone, the shopkeepers and the artisans, the school-master, the boy who drove the post-ponies, and the student daughter of the innkeeper who took round the potatoes, seemed to respect themselves, to be capable of Happiness [sic] . . ." (1914, p. 368). It was not Wallas' intention, in Human Nature and other writings, to imply that because certain patterns of political behavior are based on nonrational processes, they are therefore immutable. Indeed, insofar as he was prepared to state any
WALLER, WILLARD W. fixed principle or law of social life, it was the principle or law that human nature not only can change but that it can change for the better. There was, in short, a Rousseauan quality to Wallas' thought, in the sense that he was inclined to blame institutions rather than men for the evils of this world. The purpose of his last two books, Our Social Heritage (1921) and The Art of Thought (1926), was to prescribe environmental changes that would promote rationality and self-fulfillment. Like his contemporary Freud, Wallas insisted on the possibility of rationality and creativity, but unlike Freud, he insisted that all men could become rational and creative. While Wallas' appearances in contemporary social science literature are generally limited to brief footnotes, much of what he wrote has been long since assimilated into the main body of political and social psychology; that is to say, his formulations are less old-fashioned than commonplace, and many of them are reasonably sophisticated even if one takes into account the most recent advances in the study of political behavior. His approach, however, has been superseded by modern experimental techniques of inquiry, almost all of them unknown in his day. Arguing from simple analogy, frequently using homely anecdotes to make his point, relying heavily on newspaper stories and his own observations, Wallas was essentially an inductive thinker. The current vogue of deduction, reification, and reductionism in the social sciences, to say nothing of the fashion of extrapolation from mathematical models and simulation, would have struck him as an unfortunate and possibly reactionary trend. Wallas was neither a systematic thinker nor a reformer who believed that he had the solution to the world's problems. But as a teacher, administrator, and civil servant he was committed to a faith in social reconstruction and human improvement. As a lifelong socialist, if at times a despairing one, he could hardly be committed to anything else. ARNOLD A. ROGOW [For the historical context of Wallas' work, see SOCIALISM; and the biography of WEBB, SIDNEY AND BEATRICE; for discussion of the subsequent development of his ideas, see POLITICAL BEHAVIOR; and the biographies Of FOLLETT; LASKI; LlPPMANN.] WORKS BY WALLAS (1889) 1908 Property Under Socialism. Pages 119-135 in Fabian Essays in Socialism. Boston: Ball. (1898) 1951 The Life of Francis Place. 4th ed. London: Allen & Unwin.
443
(1908) 1948 Human Nature in Politics. 4th ed. London: Constable. -> A paperback edition was published in 1962 by the University of Nebraska Press. (1914) 1920 The Great Society: A Psychological Analysis. New York: Macmillan. 1920 The Price of Intolerance. Atlantic Monthly [1920], Jan.: 116-118. 1921 Our Social Heritage. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. 1926 The Art of Thought. London: Cape. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
COLE, MARGARET 1961 The Story of Fabian Socialism. Stanford Univ. Press. -» A paperback edition was published in 1964 by Wiley. Fabian Essays. 6th ed. (1889) 1962 London: Allen & Unwin. -» First published as Fabian Essays in Socialism by G. B. Shaw, Sidney Webb, and others. Graham Wallas, 1858-1932. 1932 London School of Economics and Political Science. -> A collection of addresses given at the London School. Graham Wallas [obituary]. 1932 The Times (London) Aug. 11: p. 12, col. 2. HALEVY, ELIE (1926) 1961 A History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century. Volume 5: Imperialism and the Rise of Labour, 1895-1905. London: Benn. -> First published in French. MACIVER, ROBERT M. 1935 Graham Wallas. Volume 15, pages 326-327 in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences. New York: Macmillan.
WALLER, WILLARD W. Willard Walter Waller (1899-1945), American sociologist, made significant contributions to the sociology of marriage, divorce, and the family, as well as to the sociology of teaching. He also anticipated many later developments in social psychiatry and in the sociology of war and of the military establishment. Waller was born in Murphysboro, Illinois. The son of a school superintendent, he grew up in an academic setting. He received his undergraduate degree in classics from the University of Illinois in 1920, his M.A. in sociology from the University of Chicago in 1925, and his PH.D. in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1929. He worked as a reporter with the Evansville (Indiana) Courier in 1920, taught Latin and French in the Morgan Park (Illinois) Military Academy from 1920 to 1926, and was an instructor in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania from 1926 to 1929, an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska from 1929 to 1931, professor at Pennsylvania State College (now University) from 1931 to 1937, and associate professor at Barnard College from 1937 to 1945. Waller's contributions to sociology were original and often provocative. His preferred methods were sympathetic introspection and the case study, al-
444
WALLER, WILLARD W.
though he also demonstrated his familiarity with statistical methods in a pioneering operationalization of stereotypes, written with Stuart A. Rice (Waller & Rice 1929). His works are characterized by concrete realism; he described social phenomena directly rather than manipulating quantitative data. He aptly described one of his works as the sociology of the commonplace, the product of systematic wondering about concrete persons and situations rather than the result of highly objective research. Waller was an omnivorous reader, especially of novels. He was an artist in word choice and was sensitive to the aesthetics of word sequence. In his search for ways of phrasing ideas he read and reread the Latin classics and the King James Bible, especially the Psalms, looking for rhythm and beauty of expression. There were also sociological classics to which he returned for similar stimulation. He claimed one should reread Cooley every five years. Perhaps no sociologist of his generation distilled more imaginative sociology out of personal experience. His major works, The Old Love and the New (1930), The Sociology of Teaching (1932), The Family: A Dynamic Interpretation (1938a), and The Veteran Comes Back (1944), are filled with anecdotes from his own life and the lives of his students and colleagues, interspersed with vivid and often salty observations from literary sources. His doctoral dissertation (based on 38 case histories of progressive marital alienation culminating in divorce) drew on introspection about his own first marriage and divorce; this work has never been equaled as a source of hypotheses about the interpersonal interactions and the phasing of divorce alienation. Sociology of education. In his treatise on educational sociology, The Sociology of Teaching, Waller made effective use of his father's experience as a superintendent, of his own experience as a secondary-school teacher, and of the case materials he collected from teachers during his University of Nebraska tenure. The work was an illuminating treatment of the school as a system of social relationships. Although its major objective was to provide "social insight" to its audience of teachers, it also furnished educational sociologists with a rich source of ideas for research. Waller was the first to apply the concept of symbolic interaction to the network of interpersonal relationships in which the teacher is caught up. He analyzed various significant teacher-other relationships, of which the teacher—pupil, teacherparent, teacher-school-board member, and teacher-
colleague relations involve the most tension. His analysis of the impact of stereotypes of teachers on these relationships and of the effect of teaching experiences in producing distinctive teacher personality-types anticipated some of the later studies of adult socialization. Sociology of the family. It is probably on the social psychology of marriage, divorce, and the family that Waller had his greatest impact. His writings in this area began with his interest in divorce and bereavement as family crises. He traced the origins of divorce-oriented alienation to the inequality of bargaining during courtship. The Family (1938a) was the first "family text" with a coherent theoretical framework. He borrowed many symbolic interactionist concepts from the works of Burgess, Cooley, Mead, Baldwin, Dewey, Arthur F. Bentley, and Ellsworth Paris. The Family focused upon interactions in American middle-class families and was the culmination of more than a decade of research and theoretical speculation. As primary data Waller used essays by students on their own dating and courtship experiences and their observations of their parents' marriages. He arranged these highly personal materials developmentally, beginning with life in the parental family, where the infant is socialized into the rigid habits of others. Symbolicinteraction theory is used to explain the development of self and the learning of self-other roles appropriate both for functioning in the parental family and for interacting as husband-father or wife-mother in a family of procreation. Waller applied processual analysis to the aiminhibited relations of early heterosexual dating and to the progressively less aim-inhibited involvements of courtship that lead to the decision to marry. He described the social context of dating and courtship as a distributive order of prestige where people at the top of the order have advantages over those who rate poorly (the "rating-dating complex"). This situation produces courtship bargaining and, when individuals of unequal prestige are involved, exploitation. His processual analysis of the sources of disruption and stabilization of marital relationships was also fruitful. He was, for example, the first to demonstrate that particular processes of interaction might produce cohesion in one relationship and conflict in another; the very fictions, inertia, and pluralistic ignorance that are often detrimental to a young marriage are shown to support a seasoned marriage. Waller closed his treatment of the family with a description of marriage and family forms that
WALLIS, WILSON D. departed from those approved by the contemporary middle classes, ranging from the polite adultery of emancipated marriages to "free love." Military sociology. His last book (1944), written in collaboration with his publisher, the gifted poet and editor Stanley Burnshaw, was a popular success. It dealt with the personal aspect of war and its aftermath for returning veterans and their families. The success of this book brought Waller not only fame but also an increasingly heavy involvement in lecturing, writing, and public affairs, which led him to exhaustion and premature death at the age of 46. Influence. Waller's potential contributions were by no means fully realized in the short span of his twenty years in sociology. He published only a fraction of his writings on the sociology of higher education and of campus life (including college fraternities). He introduced his students to social psychiatry and wrote articles (unpublished) about the sociological aspects of psychoanalysis. As he finished his writing about the sociology of war, he was turning increasingly to the political problems of social planning and social control. He was also engaged in supervising several participant-observation studies of reformatory institutions and of children's camps, which were to be part of a sociology of "institutions of segregative care." Work on this project was still going on at the time of his death. Perhaps it was as a teacher and lecturer, however, that Waller best communicated his sociological insights. He cast himself in the role of one who pulled the veil of fraud and obfuscation from public posturing, from social lying, and from "correct" behavior. He encouraged the disenchanted and alienated to think through their rebellions and to communicate their special insights to the world. Waller's formulations have become part of the storehouse of fruitful concepts in contemporary American sociology and are frequently encountered in middle-range theories in the fields in which Waller was most active—family sociology and the sociology of education. REUBEN L. HILL
445
1929
WALLER, WILLARD W.; and RICE, STUART A. Stereotypes. Pages 192-197 in Ernest W. Burgess (editor), Personality and the Social Group. Univ. of Chicago Press. 1930 The Old Love and the New: Divorce and Readjustment. New York: Liveright. (1932) 1961 The Sociology of Teaching. New York: Russell. 1934 Insight and Scientific Method. American Journal of Sociology 40:285-297. 1935 WALLER, WILLARD W.; and COWLEY, WILLIAM H. A Study of Student Life. Journal of Higher Education 6:132-142. 1936a Discussion of "Quantitative Methods in Social Psychology" [by George A. Lundberg]. American Sociological Review 1:54-60. 1936k Personality Changes in Practice Teachers. Journal of Educational Sociology 9:556-564. 1936c Social Problems and the Mores. American Sociological Review 1:922-933. 1936 WALLER, WILLARD W.; and HAWKINS, EDWARD R. Critical Notes on the Cost of Crime. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 26:679-694. 1937 The Rating and Dating Complex. American Sociological Review 2:727-734. (1938a) 1951 The Family: A Dynamic Interpretation. Rev. by Reuben Hill. New York: Dryden. 1938fo Contributions to Education of Scientific Knowledge About the Organization of Society and Social Pathology, Part 2, pages 445-460 in National Society for the Study of Education, Thirty-seventh Yearbook. Bloomington, 111.: Public School Publishing Co. 1940a War and the Family. New York: Dryden. 1940b WALLER, WILLARD W. (editor) War in the Twentieth Century. New York: Dryden. -» See especially the "Editor's Introduction," pages vii—xi, "War in the Twentieth Century," pages 3-35, and "War and Social Institutions," pages 478-532. 1942 Introduction. Pages 1-6 in Edward C. Jandy, Charles Horton Cooley: His Life and His Social Theory. New York: Dryden. 1943 The Family and Other Institutions. American Academy of Political and Social Science, Annals 229:107116. 1944 The Veteran Comes Back. New York: Dryden. 1945a A Sociologist Looks at Conscription. American Academy of Political and Social Science, Annals 241: 95-101. 1945b The Veteran's Attitudes. American Academy of Political and Social Science, Annals 238:174-179. 1945 WALLER, WILLARD W.; and KOMAROVSKY, MIRRA Studies of the Family. American Journal of Sociology 50:443-451.
WALLIS, WILSON D. [For the historical context of Waller's work, see FAMILY, article on DISORGANIZATION AND DISSOLUTION; and the biographies of BALDWIN; BENTLEY; BURGESS; COOLEY; DEWEY; MEAD; for discussion of the subsequent development of Waller's ideas, see TEACHING.] WORKS BY WALLER 1929
A Deterministic View of Criminal Responsibility. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 20:88-101.
Wilson Dallam Wallis, American anthropologist, was born in 1886. During his long teaching career he was associated primarily with the University of Minnesota, where he taught from 1923 to 1954. After retiring from Minnesota, he taught at the University of Connecticut and at Annhurst College in South Woodstock, Connecticut. At Dickinson College, where he was awarded a
446
WALLIS, WILSON D.
B.A. in 1907 and an M.A. in 1910, Wallis studied philosophy and law, and he received a PH.D. in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania in 1915. His principal interest, however, was cultural anthropology; this interest as well as his theoretical approach to the subject was the result of his experience at Oxford University, where he went as a Rhodes scholar in 1907. At that time, anthropology at Oxford was dominated by Tylor and Marett, who emphasized the importance of belief and custom and sought to trace the development of rational thought from its primitive beginnings. They dealt with European folklore as well as with the beliefs and customs of non-Western peoples, and they used their knowledge of other cultures to comment on their own society. English anthropologists were not engaged in system building: they had become critical of the earlier evolutionary reconstruction and saw as their primary theoretical task the reappraisal of earlier work on human development. They were concerned, therefore, with the distribution of culture traits—the probability that different culture traits will be found in geographical proximity and the relative importance of diffusion and of independent invention in producing the distribution. Most of Wallis' work throughout the more than fifty years of his active professional life was in the tradition established by Tylor. His emphasis on belief and custom, on rationality, on problems of diffusion, and on the comparative method differentiated his approach from that of his American contemporaries, who tended to be influenced more directly by Franz Boas. Early in his career Wallis carried out field research among the Micmac of eastern Canada (in 1911-1912) and among the Canadian Dakota (in 1914). He produced no full-length monographic study of a culture until much later, when he collaborated with his wife, Ruth Sawtelle Wallis, in further field studies among these tribes. With her he published a detailed description of the Micmac (1955) and a shorter description of the Malecite (1957). He also wrote several specialized studies of the Dakota (1919; 1923; 1947). A major theme in Wallis' writings is his concern with the application of rational thought to experience. From this point of view he examined the theoretical concepts used by his colleagues for the reconstruction of culture history; in the same spirit he examined what he called "primitive science" or "primitive religion." Although there is some material about religion and about primitive conceptions of environmental phenomena in Wallis' ethnographic monographs, much of his work in the field
of primitive science unfortunately remains unpublished. This work consists of an attempt to collate the available information on folk ideas about the workings of the physical environment. In the field of primitive religion he was perhaps the first anthropologist to give serious consideration to the phenomenon of messianic movements (1918; 1943). He dealt with these as cultural complexes and, plotting their distribution in time and space, sought to show that they are governed by the same principles as other culture complexes, such as writing. A similar approach underlies his much later book Culture Patterns in Christianity (1964). Wallis was as interested in the customs of his own society as he was in the ways of the Micmac and the Dakota. He published a book on an immigrant group in California (1965), and in his general texts he was apt to draw illustrations from the beliefs and fads of American and European society as well as from ethnographical material. Method and Perspective in Anthropology (Spencer 1954), the volume of essays presented to Wallis on his retirement from Minnesota by his colleagues and former students, has as its themes methodology, science, and religion. It is in these areas that Wallis made his most lasting contributions. ELIZABETH COLSON [See also DIFFUSION; MILLENARISM; RELIGION, article on ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDY; and the biographies of MARETT; TYLOR.] WORKS BY WALLIS
1918 Messiahs: Christian and Pagan. Boston: Badger. 1919 The Sun Dance of the Canadian Dakota. American Museum of Natural History, Anthropological Papers 16:317-380. 1923 Beliefs and Tales of the Canadian Dakota. Journal of American Folk-lore 36:36-101. 1926 An Introduction to Anthropology. New York: Harper. 1927 An Introduction to Sociology. New York: Knopf. 1930 Culture and Progress. New York: McGraw-Hill. 1939 Religion in Primitive Society. New York: Crofts. 1943 Messiahs: Their Role in Civilization. Washington: American Council on Public Affairs. 1947 The Canadian Dakota. American Museum of Natural History, Anthropological Papers, Vol. 41, part 1. New York: The Museum. 1955 WALLIS, WILSON D.; and WALLIS, RUTH S. The Micmac Indians of Eastern Canada. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press. 1957 Anthropology in England Early in the Present Century. American Anthropologist New Series 59:781790. 1957 WALLIS, WILSON D.; and WALLIS, RUTH S. The Malecite Indians of New Brunswick. National Museum of Canada, Bulletin 148. Ottawa: The Museum. 1964 Culture Patterns in Christianity. Lawrence, Kansas: Coronado.
WALRAS, LEON 1965
Fresno Armenians, to 1919. Lawrence, Kansas: Coronado. SUPPLEMENTARY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
SPENCER, ROBERT (editor) 1954 Method and Perspective in Anthropology: Papers in Honor of Wilson D. Wallis. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.
WALRAS, LEON Leon Walras (1834-1910), whose full name was Marie Esprit Leon Walras (the final "s" is sounded), is celebrated among economists and econometricians as the first to have formulated a multiequational general equilibrium model of economic relationships. He was born on December 16, 1834, in Evreux, a provincial town of Normandy, France. Although he spent more than half his adult life in Switzerland, he retained his French citizenship. His patronymic was not French but a corruption of the Dutch surname of his greatgrandfather Andreas Walravens, a journeyman tailor who migrated in 1749 from what is now County Limburg in the Netherlands to Montpellier in the south of France. There the Walras family remained in modest obscurity until Antoine Auguste Walras, Leon's father, was accepted as a student of the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, where he was a classmate of Antoine Augustin Cournot. Auguste Walras, author of De la nature de la richesse, et de I'origine de la valeur (1831), was an economist in his own right, although he failed to obtain a chair in economics and wasted his years as a minor administrator in the French educational system. His career was botched partly because of his outspoken anticlericalism, combined with a singular ineptitude in dealing with his hierarchical superiors, and partly because of his untimely advocacy of a utility theory of value, of land nationalization, and of radical tax reforms. Walras inherited his father's traits of character in all too generous measure. He also adopted his father's unorthodox economic views; indeed, his father was the only teacher of economics Walras ever had. His mother, Louise Aline nee Sainte Beuve, the daughter of a notary of Evreux, came from a locally prominent family that at times claimed the nobiliary particle de but was not of the same line as that of the famous literary critic Sainte Beuve. From his mother, Walras inherited the frugal, calculating temper of the Normans and, eventually, 100,000 francs. Walras' early education followed the usual course for youths of his station, culminating in two baccalaureate degrees, one in letters, in 1851, and
447
the other in science, in 1853. His curriculum included mathematics through high-school algebra and analytical geometry but nothing much beyond. In fact, his mathematical attainments proved insufficient to enable him to gain entrance to the Ecole Poly technique. Finally, in 1854, he was admitted as a nonresident student to the Ecole des Mines in Paris. With Bohemian insouciance he neglected his engineering studies, which he found distasteful, and turned to literature. In 1858 he published a novel, Francis Sauveur, and in 1859 a short story, "La lettre," in the Revue fran$aise. These pieces, although lacking in literary distinction, were not without significance, for they contained ideas inspired by the revolution of 1848 and, in most unlikely contexts, elements of economic reasoning that were clearly the first fruits of Walras' upbringing in an economist's household. Realizing that he was not meant for a literary career, he promised his father in the summer of 1858 that he would devote his life to economics. Professional openings for an economist in France of that epoch were extremely rare and were all the more inaccessible to Walras not only because he lacked the requisite formal university training but also because he stood outside the charmed circle of official French economists, who formed a closed corporation dedicated to the existing political and social order and to the dogma of unmitigated economic individualism. But Walras' need to make a living was pressing, particularly when he set up house around 1859 with an unmarried mother, Celestine Aline Ferbach, and had twin daughters by her in 1863, one of whom died in infancy. It was not until 1869 that he married her, legitimizing her son and his own surviving daughter, Marie Aline. He tried his hand at journalism but was soon discharged because of the independence of his opinions. He worked for a while at the secretariat of the Chemin de Fer du Nord. Then, in 1864, he became managing director of a bank for cooperatives in which Leon Say was interested, but the bank was compelled to liquidate in 1868. While he was directing the bank, Walras wrote and lectured on the organization of cooperatives, which were looked upon in the 1860s as an antidote to the revolutionary threats of the working classes. From 1866 to 1868 he and Leon Say edited a short-lived monthly cooperative organ, Le travail. Finally, before receiving his call to the Academy (later the University) of Lausanne, he was corresponding secretary for a private banking establishment in Paris. During the 12 years between his departure from Ecole des Mines and his entrance upon an
448
WALRAS, LEON
academic career in Switzerland, Walras was writing and cogitating on economic subjects. At an early stage he formulated in broad outline the whole program of his intellectual lifework: a trilogy made up of pure economics, applied economics, and what he called "social economics" (economic sociale}. Pure economics was conceived on the analogy of pure mechanics and was to consist in an explanatory model, mathematical in structure, depicting a comprehensive network of relationships rigorously derived from the assumption of supposedly perennial, or "natural," economic forces independent of institutional arrangements. Applied economics was thought of in terms of the application of pure theory to problems of production, with a view to determining, in the classical tradition, the forms of industrial organization most conducive to the maximization of social output. While applied economics hovered between the positive and the prescriptive design, social economics was to be unreservedly normative and concerned with principles of "justice" (essentially Aristotelian and Thomistic) which should govern not only the distribution of wealth, especially between the state and private individuals, but also exchange. Early economics Before going to Lausanne, Walras made little or no progress in pure economics, publishing nothing on the subject. Nevertheless, he made two fumbling attempts, which survive in manuscript, to apply the little mathematics he knew to economic analysis, and he arrived at only one concept of importance, his equation d'echange, a budget equation in all but the name. Nor did he make any advance in applied economics at this time. His attention was almost entirely absorbed in formulating the fundamental philosophical ideas of his social economics. In this period he published his first professional book, L'economie politique et la justice (1860), which was essentially an ideological work based on his father's views. In 1860, while participating in an international congress on taxation held at Lausanne, he first met the young Swiss lawyer and politician Louis Ruchonnet, who ten years later helped him to obtain his appointment to a newly established chair in political economy at Lausanne. In a series of public lectures delivered in Paris during 1867-1868 and published under the title Recherche de I'ideal social (1868), Walras expounded his philosophy of social reform based on the metaphysical ideas of Victor Cousin and Etienne Vacherot, calling for a conciliation of in-
terests. Ideological as his position was, he resisted the efforts of his Saint-Simonian friends to enroll him among their number, because their socialism was "unscientific." He always thought of himself as a "scientific" socialist, with "scientific" reasons for advocating that the state take over (by purchase) whatever private property (land, natural monopolies, railways) could be shown analytically to be inconsistent with the attainment of the relative maximum welfare that free competition, when properly constrained by the inviolable rules of "justice," would bring about. The state, then, having its own income-producing property, would not—indeed should not—impose taxes, for taxation itself interferes with the beneficent operation of competitive forces. Neither in the Recherche de I'ideal social nor in any other of the pre-Lausanne publications did Walras display analytical acumen or give any inkling of what was to come. On December 16, 1870, his 36th birthday, Walras delivered his first lecture as professeur extraordinaire in the faculty of law of the Academy of Lausanne. Virtually up to the last moment his path toward the realization of this long-cherished ambition had been beset with difficulties. The Franco-Prussian War, raging in France, made it hard enough for Walras to join his post; earlier, his appointment even for a trial period of one year had been opposed by three of the seven members of the Swiss ad hoc committee charged with the task of appraising candidates for the Lausanne chair of political economy. The minority report, while agreeing that Walras was superior to his competitors for the post, found his writings "communistic"! By 1871 all such fears were allayed and Walras was duly inaugurated as professeur ordinaire—with tenure. Whether only out of caution or out of sheer intellectual curiosity, he initially concentrated upon pure economics, which then became his dominant passion. In fact, when he later resumed writing on questions of policy, it was, as he confessed to a correspondent, mainly because he felt that his articles on current issues would eventually call attention to his analytical work. Marginal utility theory Once at Lausanne, Walras began to teach himself calculus, having been shown by Paul Piccard, a professor of mechanics, how to apply the technique of maximization to the theory of utility. Thus, Walras developed his mathematical theory of rarete (marginal utility) and presented the twocommodity case in simplified geometric form in a paper, "Principe d'une theorie mathematique de
WALRAS, LEON
449
elite of the profession took any interest at all in l'echange," which he read before the Academic des Walras' innovations, and with them he held a conSciences Morales et Politiques of Paris in 1873. tinuous seminar—by correspondence—exchanging This performance was greeted with undisguised criticisms that left their mark on the four succeshostility. After the publication of this first paper, he was dismayed to learn that W. Stanley Jevons sive editions of the Elements which appeared during Walras' lifetime. had anticipated him in originating the theory of marginal utility. Walras honorably acknowledged While Walras had no economic colleagues at Jevons' priority, consoling himself with the perLausanne with whom to take counsel, he did have fectly just reflection that he had done better than mathematical colleagues, not only Paul Piccard but Jevons in establishing a correct relation between also Hermann Amstein, from whom he got all the utility and demand. Nevertheless, his feelings of help he could. When he asked Amstein to formujealousy continued to rankle until he discovered late the mathematical conditions of minimum cost that the German economist Gossen, already dead of production, Amstein in 1877 presented him with and consequently no longer a potential rival, had an almost perfect marginal productivity model, anticipated both Jevons and himself in 1854. To even using the Lagrange multiplier method; but forestall further disappointments in his race for Walras knew too little mathematics to understand priority, Walras hastened his pace, publishing a it and Amstein too little economics to appreciate series of three additional papers in pure economics, its significance. It was not until after Wicksteed's the substance of which was embodied in the first Essay on the Co-ordination of the Laws of Distribution appeared in 1894 that Walras filled the empty edition of his Elements deconomie politique pure niche in his theory of production by incorporating (1874-1877). Barone's formulation of the marginal productivity Walras sought to make himself known to econtheory into his Elements, since Amstein's still reomists in France and elsewhere by sending them mained beyond his ken. reprints of his articles and copies of his Elements, accompanied by letters asking for criticism. His Theory of general equilibrium first success was in Italy, where Gerolamo BocFor many years Walras thought that his chief cardo, Luigi Bodio, and Alberto Errera acclaimed title to fame lay in his marginal utility theory, Walras' contributions with enthusiasm. From Gerwhich was certainly more rigorous and elegant many, England, Holland, and Denmark he received than that of either Jevons or Menger. He did not encouraging responses. In France, however, to realize the full significance of the unique character Walras' chagrin, his early work evoked either no of his general equilibrium system until Barone comment at all or else outright antagonism, except hailed it in the Giornale degli economisti (1894, from Cournot and the philosopher Charles p. 407) as "the most general, most comprehensive Renouvier. and most harmonious" that had yet appeared. As time went on, Walras' economic correspondAlready in the 1870s, in the first edition of the ence assumed enormous proportions: literally thouElements, Walras had laid the groundwork for a sands of letters passed between him and such of unified model, comprising the theories of exchange, his contemporaries as Foxwell, Marshall, Edgeproduction, capital formation, and money. In the worth, and Wicksteed in England; Menger, BohmBawerk, and Lieben in Austria; Pantaleoni, Pareto, subsequent revisions of the Elements, he strengthand Barone in Italy; Charles Gide, Hermann Lauened the model by applying the principle of utility rent, Henri Poincare (on methodology), and Albert maximization throughout. Moreover, to link his Aupetit in France; Bortkiewicz in Germany; Rnut model to the real world, he followed up each of Wicksell in Sweden; and John Bates Clark, Irving his successive cumulative submodels describing the static determination of equilibrium with a related Fisher, and Henry Ludwell Moore in the United States. He thus became literally an economist's quasi-dynamic theory of the emergence (or estabeconomist, for it was impossible for him to mold lishment^) of equilibrium via the operation of the disciples among his law students at Lausanne, who competitive market mechanism. He called the procregarded the course in economics as a tiresome ess of automatic adjustments of the network of superfluity. In other universities the novel mathereal markets to equilibrium one of tdtonnement, matical character of his writing repelled the ordithat is, of groping without conscious direction. His nary student, whose training was purely literary, argument that the process would culminate, under and the marginal utility approach to value outhis assumptions, in a stable equilibrium was, raged the orthodox economists dedicated to the nevertheless, intuitive, without any semblance of Ricardian cost-of-production approach. Only the a rigorous demonstration. Despite this and other
450
WALRAS, LEON
defects, lacunae, and inconsistencies in detail, which were inevitable in so immense a pioneer work produced with primitive mathematical tools, Walras' general equilibrium model earned for him the supreme encomium of Joseph Schumpeter, who said that "as far as pure theory is concerned, Walras is in my opinion the greatest of all economists" (1954, p. 827). The idea of general equilibrium was not new with Walras. It had already been enunciated in 1690 by Nicholas Barbon; there were discernible adumbrations of the theory in Petty, Boisguilbert, Cantillon, and especially in Turgot and Quesnay; and an implicit pattern of mutually interdependent relationships underlies the writings of the great classical founders of economics, Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Jean Baptiste Say. It is altogether unlikely, however, that Walras derived direct inspiration for his multiequational model of interdependence from these precursors. He himself liked to give the impression that his father and Cournot had furnished the principal elements of his economic theory, but Cournot had mentioned the interconnection of all the parts of the economic system only to recoil from it as surpassing "the powers of mathematical analysis," and Auguste Walras had furnished nothing but vague hints of general equilibrium. The true fons et origo of Walras' multiequational formulation of general equilibrium was Louis Poinsot's once famous textbook in pure mechanics, Elements de statique (1803), which, as Walras confided to a friend in 1901, he first read at the age of 19 and then kept by him as a companion book throughout his life. In Poinsot we find virtually the whole formal apparatus that Walras later employed in his Elements d'economie politique pure. Poinsot's Elements de statique bristles with systems of simultaneous equations, some of them equilibrium equations proper and others equations of condition (constraints or definitional identities), and contains the postulate that these systems have determinate solutions if they consist in as many independent equations as unknowns. Isnard's Traite des richesses (1781)—which Walras rescued from oblivion by inserting it in the list of writings on mathematical economics compiled by Jevons (1871)—also appears to have played a part in shaping Walras' formulation of his system. Walras praised Isnard for having correctly stated algebraically the inverse proportionality of values to quantities exchanged. Both in his unpublished juvenile essays of the 1860s and in the opening algebraic treatment of exchange in the Elements, Walras' simultaneous equations bear a remarkable
resemblance to Isnard's. Notable, too, was Isnard's anticipation of the Walrasian proposition that the use of a standard unit of account obviates the need for recourse to arbitrage in a competitive, multicommodity model. Although Walras was not really indebted to his father or to Cournot for his composite model, his pure theory does bear the sharp imprint of their influence. Walras took over, for better or for worse, a good part of his father's terminology, his taxonomy, and his conception of the object of economics. From Cournot he first learned the meaning of functional relations between variables; it was precisely his growing dissatisfaction with Cournot's particular demand function that first led him to seek a wider framework within which to express the quantity demanded of a commodity as a function not of the price of that commodity alone, but of the entire constellation of prices. This was the point of departure for his general equilibrium model. Later life and work Soon after the publication of the first edition of the Elements, Walras' wife was stricken by a fatal illness and his financial situation deteriorated. His academic salary, which had been raised in 1872 from the initial 3,600 francs per annum to 4,000 francs, still proved inadequate. To eke out the income he required for his family needs and his research and publication expenses, he had to give supplementary courses at Geneva and Neuchatel, to serve as a regular consulting actuary for a Swiss insurance company, to write fortnightly feature articles (under the pseudonym "Paul") for the Gazette de Lausanne, to contribute weighty articles to the Bibliotheque universelle, and to borrow. When in 1879 his old friend Jules Ferry became minister of public instruction in France, Walras thought he had a chance to obtain a university post in his native country and to improve his financial situation. His efforts in this direction proved vain, notwithstanding his offer to help Ferry modernize the whole French university system and, by the same token, pull the teaching of economics out of the law-school rut and give it the status of a science. In 1881 the Academy of Lausanne increased his salary to 5,000 francs. But it was only after his second marriage in 1884 (his first wife having died in 1879), that his financial condition took a substantial turn for the better. His second wife, Leonide Desiree Mailly, a French spinster who had lived for many years in England, brought with her an annuity which more than doubled the income of the Walras household. Relieved now of private financial worries, Wai-
WALRAS, LEON ras returned to his work with a burst of renewed energy. He ventured upon a fundamental revision of his theories of money and capital and took up the cause of monetary reform. In his monetary theory, he substituted the conception of a demand for cash balances (encaisse desiree'} for his earlier conception of the demand for money as depending on the volume of transactions to be cleared (circulation a desservir}. As Arthur Marget pointed out, this entailed the substitution of his earlier Fisherian equation of exchange by an equation essentially Keynesian in form (1931). The change was made in the interests of symmetry and over-all coherence in the general model, for now the same primum mobile—the maximization of utility—could operate in the theory of money as in the rest of his system. Walras' new monetary theory, first announced in his paper "Equations de la circulation" (1899), was very soon incorporated into the fourth edition of the Elements. Into this edition, he also introduced his revised conception of the role of interest as an equilibrating factor between the aggregate demand for cash balances and the existing quantity of money. Walras' revision and extension of his theory of capital formation were similarly motivated. In the fourth edition of the Elements, in order to avoid the dilemma of either continuing to use his earlier empirical savings function unrelated to the utility maximization principle or of complicating his postulates with time preference functions, Walras chose to consider savings and investment, as he did consumption and production, exclusively at the moment of decision making. He envisaged the decisions theoretically as bearing on a fictive commodity, "perpetual net income" (net of depreciation and insurance charges), each unit of which represents a perpetual yield of one unit of numeraire per annum from whatever assets, human as well as marketable, an individual possesses. This commodity, having a utility function of its own, enters into the general equilibrium model on the same footing as any other commodity and renders the entire system homogeneous. In his writings on monetary reform, Walras focused his attention upon the questions, then current, of bimetallism and bank note issue. His work Theorie mathematique du bimetallisme (1881) presented, in the form of an ad hoc model, a complete theory of the bimetallist standard with a fixed ratio. Basing his proposal on this model, as well as on his utility theory and his conception of "justice," he advocated a symmetallist system in the form of a gold standard with a regulatory silver token currency. The state would
451
regulate the quantity of a special silver token currency in such a way as to counteract the long wave fluctuations in the value of money. In the matter of bank note issue, Walras maintained that any system that fell short of 100 per cent metallic coverage was dangerous. These arduous labors exhausted Walras. By 1892 he felt he could no longer go on with his teaching. The inheritance he received from his mother in that year enabled him to purchase an annuity and repay his old debts, incurred mainly in the publication and free distribution of his books and economic papers. Thereupon, he retired from the university on a pension of 800 francs a year and was succeeded in his chair by his protege Vilfredo Pareto. He did not, however, lay down his pen. In the decade 1892-1902, as has been seen, he made some of his most important innovations in the theory of capital and money. He could not, however, find strength to write the systematic treatises he had planned on applied economics and social economics. Instead, he published two volumes of collected papers, Etudes deconomie sociale in 1896 and Etudes deconomie politique appliquee in 1898. From 1902 on, after completing his notes for what ultimately became the definitive edition of 1926, he devoted himself to puttering and to propaganda in favor of his theory. Upon the death of his second wife in 1900, her annuity ceased, and Walras and his unmarried daughter, Aline, moved, without regrets, to a modest apartment at Clarens, near Montreux, where he died on January 5, 1910. Six months before his death, the University of Lausanne celebrated his jubilee as an economist, on which occasion he was acclaimed in messages from all over the world as the founder of the general equilibrium school. Though Walras had received occasional marks of recognition before his death, it was only posthumously that his reputation and influence grew to their present proportions. After 1910, Etienne Antonelli championed the Walrasian model in his lectures and writings in France. Elsewhere, Walras' model has been the subject of continued emendations, controversy, and fluctuating evaluations. His crabbed notations have been streamlined; his crude mathematics polished, perfected, and modernized; his utility theory superseded by a theory of ordinal preference unencumbered by assumptions of cardinal measurement and independence; his production theory freed from implications that had left the distinction between free and scarce goods empirically hazy; his production functions generalized to admit more easily of variable coefficients of production; his investment theory dis-
452
WALRAS, LEON
associated from postulates of certainty of outcome; and his unwarranted premise that equality between the number of unknowns and the number of independent equations is sufficient for a determinate solution supplanted by rigorous existence theorems. For all that, the main lines of the Walrasian model remain intact, and its authority is such that in 1949 Milton Friedman was forced to admit, "We curtsy to Marshall, but we walk with Walras" (p. 489). Some critics, while conceding the aesthetic qualities of the general equilibrium model, hold it to be sterile, little realizing that pure economics is no more intended for direct application to practical problems than pure mechanics is intended for guidance to machinists. Besides, it is putting a strange construction upon the word "sterility" to apply it to an over-all theory that is the acknowledged forebear of input-output analysis and that directly begot the modern conceptions of exchange, production, saving, investment, interest, and money and fitted them neatly into a single, coherent framework. This was the achievement of Walras, a lonely, cantankerous savant, often in straitened circumstances, plagued with hypochondria and a paranoid temperament, plodding doggedly through hostile, uncharted territory to discover a fresh vantage point from which subsequent generations of economists could set out to make their own discoveries. WILLIAM JAFF& [Directly related is the entry ECONOMIC EQUILIBRIUM. See also the biographies of BARONE; BOHM-BAWERK; GOSSEN; JEVONS; SCHLESINGER.]
MENGER;
PARETO;
WlCKSELL;
WORKS BY WALRAS
1860
L'economic politique et la justice. Paris: No publisher given. 1868 Recherche de I'ideal social: Legons publiques faites a Paris. Paris: Guillaumin. 1874 Principle d'une theorie mathematique de 1'echange. Academic des Sciences Morales et Politiques, Paris, Seances et travaux 101:97-116. (1874-1877) 1954 Elements of Pure Economics: Or, the Theory of Social Wealth. Translated by William Jarfe. Homewood, 111.: Irwin; London: Allen & Unwin. -> First published in French as Elements d'economie politique pure. The definitive French edition appeared in 1926. 1881 Theorie mathematique du bimetallisme. Paris: Guillaumin. 1883 Theorie mathematique de la richesse sociale. Lausanne: Corbaz. 1886 Theorie de la monnaie. Lausanne: Corbaz. (1896) 1936 Etudes d'economie sociale (Theorie de la repartition de la richesse sociale}. 2d ed. Lausanne: Rouge. (1898) 1936 Etudes d'economie politique appliquee (Theorie de la production de la richesse sociale). 2d ed. Lausanne: Rouge.
(1899) 1954 The Mechanism and Equations of Circulation and Money; Solution of the Equations of Circulation and Money; the Law of the Establishment and Variation of the Price of Money; Price Curve of the Money Commodity. Pages 315-337 in Leon Walras, Elements of Pure Economics: Or, the Theory of Social Wealth. Homewood, 111.: Irwin; London: Allen & Unwin. -> First published as Equations de la circulation, a paper read to the Societe Vaudoise des Sciences Naturelles, and incorporated into the fourth edition of the Elements in 1900. The Correspondence of Leon Walras and Related Papers. 3 vols. Selected and edited by William Jaffe. Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing, 1965. -»• Contains letters dated 1857 to 1909. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
BARONE, ENRICO (1894)1936 Sul trattamento di quistioni dinamiche. Volume 1, pages 77-114 in Enrico Barone, Le opere economiche. Bologna: Zanichelli. -> First published in Volume 9 of the Giornale degli economisti, Series 2. BOSON, MARCEL 1951 Leon Walras, fondateur de la politique economique scientifique. Paris: Librairie Generale de Droit et de Jurisprudence. BOUSQUET, G. H. 1964 L'autobibliographie inedite de Leon Walras (1906). Revue economique [1964]: 295304. FRIEDMAN, MILTON 1949 The Marshallian Demand Curve. Journal of Political Economy 57:463-495. -*• Reprinted in Friedman's Essays in Positive Economics (1953). HICKS, J. R. 1934 Leon Walras. Econometrica 2:338348. ISNARD, ACHILLE NICHOLAS 1781 Traite des richesses, contenant I'analyse de I'usage des richesses en general et de leurs valeurs. 2 vols. London and Lausanne: Grasset. JAFFE, WILLIAM 1935 Unpublished Papers and Letters of Leon Walras. Journal of Political Economy 43:187207. JAFFE, WILLIAM 1967 Walras' Theory of Tatonnement: A Critique of Recent Interpretations. Journal of Political Economy 75:1-19. JEVONS, W. STANLEY (1871) 1879 The Theory of Political Economy. 5th ed. New York: Kelley. -> Pages xilii contain the preface to the second edition. KUENNE, ROBERT E. 1963 The Theory of General Economic Equilibrium. Princeton Univ. Press. MARGET, ARTHUR W. 1931 Leon Walras and the "Cashbalance Approach" to the Problem of the Value of Money. Journal of Political Economy 39:569-600. MARGET, ARTHUR W. 1935 The Monetary Aspects of the Walrasian System. Journal of Political Economy 43: 145-186. PATINKIN, DON (1956) 1965 Walras' Theory of Tatonnement; Walras' Theory of Money. Pages 531-540 and 541-572 in Don Patinkin, Money, Interest and Prices: An Integration of Monetary and Value Theory. 2d ed. New York: Harper. POINSOT, Louis (1803) 1842 Elements de statique. 8th ed., rev. & enl., with corrections. Paris: Bachelier. -> An English translation was published in 1847 as The Elements of Statics. SCHUMPETER, JOSEPH A. (1910)1951 Marie Esprit Leon Walras, 1834-1910. Pages 74-79 in Joseph A. Schumpeter, Ten Great Economists From Marx to Keynes. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. -> First published in
WAR: The Study of War Zeitschrift fur Volkswirtschaft, Sozialpolitik und Verwaltung. SCHUMPETER, JOSEPH A. (1954) 1960 History of Economic Analysis. Edited by E. B. Schumpeter. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. WALRAS, AUGUSTE 1831 De la nature de la richesse, et de I'origine de la valeur. Paris: Johanneau. WICKSTEED, PHILIP H. (1894) 1932 An Essay on the Co-ordination of the Laws of Distribution. Series of Reprints of Scarce Tracts in Economic and Political Science, No. 12. London School of Economics and Political Science.
WAR The articles under this heading deal with general aspects of modern and primitive warfare. Specific types of warfare are discussed under ECONOMIC WARFARE; FEUD; INTERNAL WARFARE, articles OU
CIVIL WAR and GUERRILLA WARFARE; LIMITED WAR; NUCLEAR WAR; and PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE. Legal problems relating to war are discussed in AGGRESSION, article on INTERNATIONAL ASPECTS; INTERNATIONAL CRIMES; MILITARY LAW; and SANCTIONS, INTERNATIONAL. For related topics of more general interest see CONFLICT; DISARMAMENT; FOREIGN POLICY; MILITARY; PEACE; STRATEGY; and the detailed guide under INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS.
i. THE STUDY OF WAR n. PRIMITIVE WAR
Quincy Wright Andrew P. Vayda
THE STUDY OF WAR
War in the ordinary sense is a conflict among political groups, especially sovereign states, carried on by armed forces of considerable magnitude for a considerable period of time. In this sense, war is not sharply distinguished from peace. Conflicts between states may be carried on by diplomacy, economic pressures, propaganda, subversion, or other forms of intervention without the use or even the threat of armed force. Even if armed force is used, its use may be on such a small scale or of such short duration—as in suppressions of mob violence or insurrection, colonial expeditions, and reprisals by large against small states—that it is not called war. The progress of war and peace between a pair of states may be represented by a curve: the curve descends toward war as tensions, military preparations, exchange of threats, mobilizations, border hostilities, and limited hostilities culminate in total conflict; and it rises toward peace as tensions relax, arms budgets decline, disputes are settled, trade increases, and cooperative activities develop.
453
Sociologists and lawyers seeking a clear concept of war have sought criteria sharply separating it from peace. They have followed Hugo Grotius, who, criticizing Cicero's definition of war as "a contending by force," said that war is not a "contest but the condition of those contending by force," a condition marked by precise points in time separating a "state of war" from a "state of peace." According to this definition, war is an institution permitting types of behavior and action that are denned by law as inappropriate to a state of peace. This concept implies clear criteria for determining the beginning and the end of war and for distinguishing belligerents and neutrals during that period. As defined by jurists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the main characteristic of a state of war is the juristic equality of the belligerents, their freedom to use armed force against one another, and the impartiality and abstention of neutrals. War in this sense has been defined as "a legal condition which equally permits two or more hostile groups to carry on a conflict by armed force" (Wright [1942] 1965, pp. 8, 698). Accordingly, it is clear that a state of war may exist with no actual hostilities, and, conversely, hostilities of considerable magnitude may exist without a state of war. War can be initiated by a formal declaration, by an ultimatum with a time limit, or by an act clearly manifesting an intention to create such a state. It is normally ended by a treaty of peace, although a long suspension of hostilities or an armistice providing for an indefinite suspension can also be regarded as manifesting an intention to end the war. The outlawry of war. While war in this institutional sense was recognized throughout most modern history and was to some extent codified in the Hague conventions of 1899 and 1907, it has been "outlawed" by recent generally ratified conventions. The League of Nations Covenant of 1920 obliged members not to resort to war until the League had had nine months to attempt a settlement of the dispute, not to engage in aggression against the territorial integrity or political independence of other states, and to establish economic sanctions against the state that violated these obligations. The Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 obliged its 63 parties to "renounce it [war] as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another" and never to seek "the settlement or solution of ... disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them—except by pacific means." The pact also asserted in its preamble that a state that violated its prescriptions would not be protected from defensive or policing action by other states; thus the
454
WAR: The Study of War
aggressor and the defender would not be legally equal. These principles were reasserted by the League of Nations when it brought about a ceasefire in hostilities between Albania and its neighbors in 1921, between Iraq and Turkey in 1924, between Greece and Bulgaria in 1925, and between Colombia and Peru in 1932; and when it recommended discrimination between the aggressor and the defender after its cease-fire order had failed to end hostilities in the Chaco in 1928, in Manchuria in 1931, and in Ethiopia in 1935. The League did not act successfully in the Vilna dispute in 1920, in Corfu in 1923, in Spain in 1936, or in the SinoJapanese hostilities in 1937, nor did it stop the Axis aggressions that led to World War n. The United States and other states, however, while still nonparticipants in World War n, discriminated between the Axis aggressors and the defenders, and the Nuremberg and other war-crimes tribunals imposed penalties upon individuals found to have been responsible for these aggressions. The United Nations Charter clarified this law by obliging its members to "settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered"; to "refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations"; to "give the United Nations every assistance in any act it takes in accordance with the present Charter"; and to "refrain from giving assistance to any state against which the United Nations is taking preventive or enforcement action." These provisions make it clear that if the United Nations organs fulfill their responsibility of determining the aggressor (arts. 24, 39) and if provisional measures do not stop the hostilities (art. 40), then the participants cannot be equally entitled to settle their conflict by force. These provisions were put into effect in 1950 when the United Nations found that North Korea and Communist China were aggressors in the Korean hostilities and initiated sanctions against them. The United Nations also found the Soviet Union guilty of aggression in its invasion of Hungary in 1956 but did not recommend sanctions. It ordered a cease-fire with relative success in the cases of Indonesia in 1946, Greece in 1946, Kashmir in 1948, Palestine in 1948, Suez in 1956, and West Irian in 1957; but cease-fire orders were less successful in the cases of Korea in 1950, Hungary in 1956, Yemen in 1959, the Congo in 1960, Cyprus in 1962, and Malaysia in 1964. In spite of these legal prescriptions and their
implementation, history has made it clear that outlawry of war has not eliminated the possibility, or even the probability, of hostilities or of war: Hostilities in Manchuria in 1931-1933, in Ethiopia in 1935-1936, in Spain in 1936-1939, during World War n, 1939-1945, in Korea in 1950-1953, in Indochina in 1947-1954, and in Algeria in 19531960 were of a magnitude sufficiently large to be called war; since 1920 a total of 40 instances of hostility have been counted in each of which more than five hundred participants were killed (Wright [1942] 1965, appendix C). The cold war between the communist and Western states started shortly after World War ii; propaganda, subversion, guerrilla activities, border hostilities, and, especially, threats of nuclear war created anxieties on both sides of the "iron curtain" that a third world war could occur. The problem of war, therefore, continues and has indeed become a greater problem than ever before. The shrinking of the world, through improved communication and transportation, has increased the probability that hostilities anywhere will affect people everywhere; the acceleration of history through the development of modern science and technology has diminished the prospect of a stable balance of military power; the invention of weapons of extraordinary destructiveness and delivery means of extraordinary speed has made direct defense impossible; and the rise of popular awareness of world conditions has increased general anxiety about the possibility of war and its danger to mankind. Metaphorical meanings. In addition to the popular and the legal conceptions of war, the term has been applied metaphorically to numerous types of opposition—both conflict and competition—that have been distinguished from relations of peaceful coexistence and cooperation. People refer to the war of words, of economic classes, of competing forms, and of organic species in the "struggle for existence"; wars between the sexes, the generations, and the races; wars against poverty, disease, crime, and, indeed, against war itself. In all these cases, discrimination has not been made between "conflicts," where the entities involved are conscious of and hostile to one another, and "competition," where such awareness and hostility does not necessarily exist. The inclusion of the competitive relationship is an extreme extension of the idea of war, hardly justifiable even as metaphor, particularly as it has been used to justify war in the usual sense as necessary for progress. Thus, according to Ernest Renan: "War is in a way one of the conditions of progress, the cut of the whip which
WAR: The Study of War prevents a country from going to sleep, forcing satisfied mediocrity itself to leave its apathy" (1871, p. 111). Social and political Darwinists like Gumplowicz, Ratzenhofer, Treitschke, and Steinmetz considered the social need for war eternal. According to Steinmetz: "War is an ordeal instituted by God, who weighs the nations in its balance. . . . Its dread hammer is the welder of men into cohesive states, and nowhere but in such states can human nature adequately develop its capacity. The only alternative is 'degeneration'" (James [1910] 1911, pp. 280, 281). However, sociologists like Herbert Spencer, Walter Bagehot, and Yakov Novikov, while recognizing the constructive influence of war under certain technological and social conditions, believed that civilization creates conditions under which war's influence is negative (Wright [1942] 1965, pp. 1037, 1146). "War created and expanded states and then destroyed them. It unified civilizations and then disintegrated them" (ibid,, p. 165). "Thus war has stood out more and more as a recurrent catastrophe in civilized human existence" (pp. 378-379). History of war The history of war can be conveniently divided into five great periods: animal, primitive, civilized, modern, and recent war, distinguished by the technologies utilized in lethal conflicts. Animal war. Animals generally utilize only bodily equipment, provided by heredity, although monkeys occasionally throw stones and higher apes sometimes use clubs. Animals differ greatly in their equipment for aggression and defense. Although an animal cannot change this equipment, the manner of using it may be developed by experience. Lethal hostilities between animals of the same species are usually disadvantageous to the survival of the species and are rare. Nonlethal hostilities occur but are largely confined to hostilities between males for possession of females, hostilities to defend the nesting site against intrusion, and hostilities to maintain leadership of the group. Aggressive behavior among young monkeys, as among children, usually arises from rivalry for possession of an object, from intrusion of a stranger into the group, or from frustration of activity. Among animals of different species the predators attack other species for food, and the attacked defend themselves more often by flight than by counterattack. Such activities, however, resemble the activities of man in the hunt rather than in war. The study of hostilities among animals can throw light on the drives leading to aggression in
455
man, on the influence of specialized techniques of aggression and defense on the frequency and intensity of hostilities, and on the survival of the individual, the group, or the species. Such specializations as the lion's striking power, the antelope's fleetness, the buffalo herd's mass charge, the elephant's size and relative invulnerability, and the cooperative activity of social insects have analogues to human military instruments and tactics. The relationship of conflict, competition, cooperation, coexistence, territorial control, and hierarchic dominance to the nature of hostilities and the course of evolution can also be studied in animal species. From the study of animal relationships, behavior patterns, and instruments, ecologists have gained insight into the behavior of human groups in a state of nature in relation to one another— that is, under conditions in which each guides its behavior only by consideration of its own interest. Primitive war. Primitive man, prior to any contact with civilization, was equipped with speech but not with writing and was organized politically in clans, villages, or tribes on principles of blood relationship; both in the hunt and in war he utilized stones, clubs, spears, and the bow and arrow for attack, and animal skins and the shield for defense. It has been contended by some anthropologists that the most primitive peoples were peaceful and that the institution of war was unknown until learned from advanced civilizations. Yet, customs of warmaking have existed among most primitive peoples that have been observed (the Greenland and Labrador Eskimos and the peaceful Andamans have been cited as exceptions), and the cave pictures drawn by ancient man seem to indicate that wars occurred. Among primitive people, men generally did the fighting, although they were seldom specialized except by age for this purpose, and their hostilities, although often initiated by elaborate ceremonials, were usually conducted by sudden and brief raids, their legs being the only means of mobility. War was usually a highly formalized institution with the object of vindicating the group mores that were thought to have been offended by a member of another tribe, usually through wife stealing or witch doctoring. Economic gain or political conquest was not a motive among hunting and collecting peoples but played an increasing role with the advent of herding and agriculture. Whatever its ostensible purpose, primitive war served to manifest the unity of the fighting group, its distinctiveness from its neighbors, and the reality of its customs and institutions. It contributed to social solidarity by distinguishing the cooperating "ingroup" from all opposing "out-groups." The clan
456
WAR: The Study of War
was the ultimate in-group, but peaceful relations among neighbors might develop, creating a tribe as a larger in-group. As primitive peoples advanced to agriculture and herding, the in-group became even larger through the integration of tribes into kingdoms or federations, the warriors became specialized, weapons and tactics became more efficient, economic and political motives for war began to develop, and casualties increased in magnitude. Civilized war. Primitive peoples usually achieved the distinction of "civilization" by developing a written language, systematic agriculture or herding, and a hierarchic political organization controlling a defined territory. Economic and political classes developed, commercial centers arose, and population increased. War became an institution conducted by a specialized class for purposes of plunder, territorial acquisition, trade, or the expansion of religion or ideology. Mobility in war was assisted by use of the horse or chariot, armies were disciplined, cities were fortified, and siege engines were developed. The characteristics of war differed among different civilizations and at different stages in the same civilization. The ancient civilizations of Babylonia, Greece, Rome, and Japan appear to have been more warlike than those of ancient Egypt, China, and India (ibid., p. 572). A civilization usually began with many citystates, each with a ruler conscious of the religion, political organization, economic needs, and ambitions of his state. Each state struggled to maintain and forward its interests against the pressure of others and, for that purpose, attempted to increase its power and resources, often under the pressure of an increasing population. The interest of the state was usually identified with the interest of the ruling group or individual in maintaining or augmenting position, wealth, and glory. In each civilization war increased in efficiency and destructiveness with the invention of new weapons and tactics. The "heroic age" merged into a "time of troubles" as small states were conquered by the large, as public administration became more efficient, and as the tactics of dash-and-maneuver were succeeded by tactics of mass charge of trained phalanxes or legions, and by the use of siege engines against walled cities. Alliances and power balancing came to be recognized, tending toward a bipolarization of power and frequently resulting in universal conquest of a civilization, as happened under Ahmose I and Thutmose i in Egypt, Hammurabi, and, more than a millennium later, Tiglath-pileser in Mesopotamia, Alexander in the Middle East, Asoka in India, Ch'in in China, and
Julius Caesar in the Mediterranean and Gaul. Such a "universal state" was eventually weakened by overcentralization, corruption, and decay, permitting the external barbarians and the internal proletariat to destroy it and to begin a new civilization centering on a new ideology or religion. The great wars that usually preceded universal conquest were frequently accompanied by unsuccessful efforts at confederation and disarmament. This course of change, in which war contributed first to the integration of a civilization and later to its destruction, can be studied in the histories of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, China, and India, and there is some evidence of similar changes in the pre-Columbian civilizations of Mexico and Peru. The historic record is, however, best known in the classic civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome, the Christian civilization of medieval Europe, and the Muslim civilization of the Middle East and north Africa. Eight great wars in the two millenniums of Western civilization originated in efforts at largescale conquest. Alexander the Great in the fourth century B.C., utilizing the Macedonian phalanx and siege engines, conquered and to some extent Hellenized a short-lived empire extending from the Indus to Egypt and from Iran to Greece. Rome, utilizing the legions of disciplined infantry and cavalry in Greece, the Middle East, Carthage, Spain, and Gaul, established in three centuries of warfare an empire that maintained the Pax Romana among 150 million people during the century of the Antonine Caesars. Attila, with an army of Huns and Germans on horseback, overran much of the Roman Empire but was defeated at the Battle of Chalons in 451 A.D. Subsequent invasions by Germanic tribes, as well as the influence of Christianity, the deterioration of agriculture, and the increasing dependence for frontier defense upon barbarian mercenaries, seriously weakened the Western empire until it was taken over by barbarian rulers in 476. Muhammad and his successors after 622, using horsemen and religious enthusiasm, extended the empire of Islam into Arabia, Iran, India, eastern Anatolia, Egypt, north Africa, and Spain, but this expansion was checked in France by Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours in 732. Charlemagne's feudal army of knights on horseback and militia established in the eighth century a short-lived empire in France, Germany, and Italy, followed by the decentralized Holy Roman Empire. Norsemen in Viking ships invaded northern
WAR: The Study of War Europe, Italy, Iceland, Greenland, and America from the ninth to the eleventh centuries and established permanent governments in Normandy, England, and Iceland. With papal inspiration, western European princes crusaded against Islam, and incidentally against the Byzantine Empire, in the Middle East and Spain from 1095 to 1270. They established a short-lived kingdom in Palestine and strengthened the internal solidarity of Christendom, contributing to the Pax Ecclesiae of the thirteenth century. England attempted to conquer France in the Hundred Years' War from 1337 to 1453 with feudal armies, longbowmen, and naval transport, contributing to the development of national consciousness in both of these countries, particularly in France, which had rallied behind the standard of Joan of Arc and eventually drove out the English, who then turned to civil war (the War of the Roses). These eight major wars generally had ideological, economic, psychological, political, and juridical causes. The ideological element was most prominent in the expansion of Islam, the conquests of Charlemagne, and the Crusades, but it also figured in Alexander's devotion to Hellenism and in the rising nationalistic ideologies of England and France during the Hundred Years' War. Economic factors, too, were present, especially in the plundering raids of the Huns and the Vikings. But such considerations also influenced the Roman conquerors, who were in search of new sources of food as population increased and agriculture deteriorated in Italy, and the Islamic warriors and Christian crusaders, who hoped for economic gains through distant conquests. The political urge to expand empire and to win glory, security, and peace was undoubtedly a motivation in the conquests by Alexander, Caesar, the Huns, the caliphs, Charlemagne, the Normans, the crusaders, and the English Plantagenets and Lancastrians. Juridical grounds were found to justify most of these wars. Alexander claimed to be acting on the authority of the Greek cities that had conferred hegemony upon him to defend them against Persia; Roman generals acted under the authority of the Fetial College, an ancient Roman institution purporting to apply international law; Islam operated under the legal as well as spiritual authority of the Koran; while Charlemagne and the crusaders acted under the authority of the pope and the medieval theory of a "just war." England tried to make a legal case for its invasion of France
457
under feudal law and hereditary claims. The Huns and the Norsemen had little concern for legal justifications, although William the Conqueror made claims to England on the basis of feudal law. Modern war. Modern history was ushered in by the use of gunpowder in war, the use of the printing press in nationalist propaganda, and the discoveries by Europeans of the orbits of the planets and the civilizations of America, Asia, and Africa, which destroyed the medieval conception of the universe and of the world. Modern history continued with the exploration and exploitation of the discovered territories, establishing permanent contacts among all the civilizations. The Renaissance acquainted Europe with the ideas of the ancients and developed ideas of humanism; the Reformation destroyed the unity of Christendom; and there was general acceptance of the concept of the sovereign territorial state, as set forth by Machiavelli, Bodin, and Hobbes, emphasizing military power as the basis of political authority. This period began with the wars of Turkish expansion against the Byzantine Empire, which ended in 1453 with the Turkish conquest of Constantinople, marking the first use of gunpowder in siege artillery. Further wars of Turkish expansion in Europe followed, culminating in the failure of the Turks to take Vienna in 1683 and the signing of the treaty of Karlowitz in 1699. After the Spanish conquest of the Moors and the unification of the peninsula under Ferdinand and Isabella, wars of Spanish expansion continued under Charles v and Phillip n from 1521 to the destruction of the armada in 1588. The wars of religion that began in most of the western European countries after the Reformation of 1520 culminated in the Thirty Years' War, terminated in 1648 by the Peace of Westphalia, which recognized the dominance of the secular state over the church. The wars against Louis xiv, who was seeking to dominate Europe, ended with the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713, which recognized the principle of the balance of power utilized during these wars by William in of England. The Seven Years' War, fought in Europe, North America, India, and on the high seas, was the first genuinely world-wide war. It was ended in Europe by the Peace of Hubertusburg of 1763, augmenting the power of Prussia under Frederick the Great; outside Europe it was ended by the Peace of Paris, establishing British dominance in North America and India through the diplomacy of Lord Chatham, the elder Pitt.
458
WAR: The Study of War
The American Revolution, which eventually involved France, Spain, and the Netherlands, as well as the American colonies, against Britain, was ended by the Peace of Paris in 1783, establishing the independence of the United States as the first nonEuropean member of the community of nations. The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars began with the expansive tendencies of the French revolutionary ideas (liberty, equality, and fraternity). In 1815 the Treaty of Vienna restored the ancien regime in France and in the states it had conquered—but only after the ideas of the revolution had been widely spread throughout Europe. The Crimean War, begun in 1854, involved most of the great powers and was ended by the Peace of Paris in 1856, checking Russian expansion in Turkey and the Balkans. The wars of Italian and German unification, organized by Cavour and Bismarck, were ended by the Peace of Frankfurt between France and Germany and by the Italian occupation of Rome in 1871, which contributed to the acceptance of the principle of nationalities that had been expounded by Giuseppe Mazzini. The American Civil War, bloodier than any European war between the battles of Waterloo and the Marne, ended by the suppression of the Southern rebellion in 1865. The Taiping Rebellion in China was the bloodiest war of the nineteenth century. It lasted from 1850 to 1864, caused 20 million deaths, and ended with the restoration of the Manchu emperor after United States and British generals had given him assistance. The Lopez War of Paraguay was the second bloodiest war of the nineteenth century. It lasted from 1865 to 1870 and was ended by the defeat of the Paraguayan dictator Lopez by the combined armies of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, after destruction of a large majority of the Paraguayan population. The Russo-Turkish War began in 1878 and appeared to be terminated by the Treaty of San Stefano, but this was modified by the Treaty of Berlin under which the great powers deprived Russia of the fruits of its victory. The Spanish-American War "liberated" Cuba and led to the conquest of the Philippines, terminated Spanish colonialism (except in Africa), extended the American domain to the eastern hemisphere, thus weakening the basis for the Monroe Doctrine, and achieved great power status for the United States. Suppression of the Philippine insurrection cost more lives than the war against Spain,
which was rapidly terminated by the overwhelming superiority of the U.S. Navy. The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 was ended by the Treaty of Portsmouth, which checked Russian advance in Manchuria and gained for Japan the status of a great power. The civil wars in Mexico, 1910 to 1920; Russia, 1917 to 1920; China, 1927 to 1936; and Spain, 1936 to 1939, arose from ideological differences, induced foreign interventions, and caused many casualties, reminiscent of the ideological hostilities following the Reformation of 1520 and the American and French revolutions of the late eighteenth century. The policy of considering ideological conflicts as falling within the domestic jurisdiction of territorial states was recognized in the treaties of Westphalia and Vienna, was assumed by modern international law, and has been reasserted since the 1950s in policies of nonintervention in civil strife and peaceful coexistence of states with differing ideologies, as well as in the United Nations Charter. World War i, 1914-1918, cost nine million military and thirty million civilian lives. Russia was defeated by Germany, and soon after the Soviet government was established; but the war was finally ended by the defeat of Germany and its allies, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey. The Treaty of Versailles and treaties with each of Germany's allies established the League of Nations, modified European boundaries in accord with the principle of self-determination of peoples, and placed German and Turkish colonies under the mandate system supervised by the League of Nations. The obligations imposed on Germany were considered so severe that after the refusal of the United States to participate in the League and to maintain the treaty, they facilitated the rise of Hitler in Germany and contributed to World War n. World War n, 1939 to 1945, cost seventeen million military and 34 million civilian lives. It was initiated by the Axis powers—Germany, Italy, and Japan—and was ended by their "unconditional surrender" after the deaths of Hitler and Mussolini and after the destruction of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic bombs. The Allied powers occupied the defeated states until peace was made by treaty with the lesser Axis powers—Bulgaria, Hungary, Italy, Rumania, and Finland—in 1946, with Japan in 1952, and de facto with Germany by agreements of the Western states with West Germany in 1952 and by the Soviet Union with East Germany in 1954.
WAR: The Study of War The two Germanys were respectively admitted to the NATO and Warsaw alliances in 1955. Each of the wars mentioned above cost over 100,000 lives. They were the largest in a list of 278 during the period from 1484 to 1945 (Wright [1942] 1965, 636 ff.). Richardson, in his Statistics of Deadly Quarrels (1960a), also lists as of this magnitude the Russo-Turkish War, 1828-1829, the Muslim rebellions in China, 1861-1878 and 1928, the Cuban Ten Years' War, 1868-1878, the Colombian Civil War, 1899-1902, the Maji-Maji rebellion against Germany in east Africa, 1905, the Dutch war against the Achin in Sumatra, 1873-1908, and the Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay, 1930-1935, but the evidence of casualties in these wars seems to be even less certain than in the major wars listed. Of the 278 wars listed by Wright, 187 were fought mainly in Europe, and 91 were fought outside Europe; 135 were balance-of-power wars to maintain national sovereignty against imperial encroachments; 78 were civil wars for a revolutionary ideology, for national self-determination, or for national unity; and 65 were wars between peoples of different civilizations, either for the defense of European civilization against the Turks or the Barbary states or for colonial expansion of European states in America, Asia, and Africa. The same factors can be found in the causation of the wars of modern history as can be found in those of the earlier period; however, from the midseventeenth to the twentieth century, ideology was less important while political imperialism and nationalism were more important. Religion as well as power balancing figured in the Turkish and Spanish wars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Thirty Years' War began as a war of religion but ended as a political war. Ideological factors were significant in the American and French revolutionary wars of the eighteenth century and in the two world wars of the twentieth century but were overshadowed by interest in nationalism and the balance of power. The imperial ambitions of Spain and, a century later, of Louis xiv were combated by British leadership in organizing alliances in the interest of national sovereignty; and in the same way, British intervention checked the imperial expansion of France in the French revolutionary and Napoleonic period and of Russia at the time of the Crimean War. The European powers intervened to check Russian expansion after its victory over Turkey in 1878. Japan similarly checked Russian expansion in its war of 1904. The Western powers sought to check
459
the imperial expansion of Germany in World War I and of Germany, Italy, and Japan in World War n. The balance-of-power principle was, therefore, a major factor in these wars. The Seven Years' War satisfied Prussian nationalism in Europe. It also ended the rivalry of Great Britain and France for overseas empire with the victory of the former, with its superior sea power; but the balance of power was restored by the American Revolution. The wars of Italian and German unification and the American Civil War were fought primarily for nationalism, self-determination, and unity as were, in some degree, the Taiping Rebellion and the Lopez War, where the factors of ideology and imperialism also played a part. Ideology and nationalism figured prominently in the Mexican, Russian, Chinese, and Spanish revolutions of the twentieth century. Legal claims or justifications were less important in the modern period than in the medieval period, when the idea of "just war" was prominent. In the modern period war was generally regarded as a prerogative of sovereignty, and "reason of state" was considered sufficient justification. However, in war propaganda it was generally considered desirable to cite justifications such as necessary defense; maintenance of the balance of power; correction of historic, strategic, national, or economic boundaries; independence from colonial oppression; nationality; a "civilizing mission," or the "white man's burden." After World War i the Covenant principles that distinguished the aggressor from the victim were usually applied by the League of Nations if efforts to nip hostilities in the bud by a cease-fire order failed. Such efforts were not successful in stopping Japanese aggression in Manchuria, China, and the Pacific; Italian aggression in Ethiopia, Spain, and Yugoslavia; German aggression in Spain, the Rhineland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Scandinavia; or Russian aggression in Finland. Recent war. Recent military history began with the use of atomic weapons at the end of World War ii and continued with the development of jet planes, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and space satellites. These inventions have had a more revolutionary influence on war than did the invention of the phalanx and the legion in ancient history or of gunpowder, artillery, and small arms in modern history. Thirty hostile incidents resulting in more than five hundred deaths each occurred from 1946 to 1965, but none involved the use of atomic weapons. The most serious were the India-Pakistan hos-
460
WAR: The Study of War
tilities over partition, 1947-1948, and the Korean hostilities in which UN forces tried to suppress North Korean aggression, 1950-1953, each of which resulted in more than half a million deaths. Hostilities in Indochina, 1947-1954, Colombia, 1948-1964, China, 1949, Algeria, 1954-1960, and the Congo, 1960-1962, resulted in more than 100,000 deaths each. The nuclear powers have shown a strong desire to prevent the escalation of hostilities to nuclear war. Half of these hostilities were domestic, and in most of those that were international or threatened to become so intervention by the United Nations or other international bodies brought about a cease-fire. Communist activity was involved in twelve of these incidents, other revolutionary activity in four, colonial self-determination in twelve, and legal or political claims concerning territory or jurisdiction were advanced by the initiator of the hostilities in nine cases. Only three of the incidents were in Europe (Greece, Hungary, Cyprus), four were in Latin America (Bolivia, Paraguay, Colombia, Cuba), six were in Africa (Madagascar, Algeria, Egypt, Congo, Angola, Burundi), and of seventeen that were in Asia, three were in west Asia (Syria, Palestine, Yemen), five in south and central Asia (India and Pakistan, Hyderabad, Kashmir, Tibet, India-China frontier), five in southeast Asia (Indonesia, Malaya, Indochina, Vietnam, Laos), and four in east Asia (Taiwan, China, Korea, Quemoy and Matsu). Fifty-eight states or political groups were primary participants in one or more of these incidents and 14 other states contributed contingents to the UN forces. The cold war between the Soviet Union and a dozen allies, on the one hand, and the United States and a score of allies, on the other, began in 1946 and continued for over a decade through propaganda, subversion, infiltration, guerrilla activities, and border hostilities. Of the resulting conflicts, the Greek, Korean, Hungarian, and Vietnamese hostilities were the most serious. The cold war, however, showed signs of abatement with the death of Stalin in 1953, followed by the break between Communist China and the Soviet Union and by the independent policy of France. Some regarded the cold war as ended after the signing of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which apparently manifested the determination of the principal nuclear powers to cooperate in preventing nuclear war and preserving peaceful coexistence. At the same time, the United States and the Soviet Union struggled to make converts and win allies by example, persuasion, economic aid, and other non-
military forms of intervention. The resignation of Khrushchev, the Chinese explosion of an atomic device in October 1964, and the large-scale hostilities in Vietnam since 1965 will doubtless have further effects on the cold war. In the most recent period of the history of war, and indeed since the beginning of the twentieth century, both governments and people have increasingly believed that war is an evil that is susceptible of effective control by human efforts and have made such efforts with increasing vigor as the dangers of total war have increased. The analysis of war War has been written about since man learned to write, and the variety of attitudes toward it have been reflected in the varied points of view of writers. Political, economic, technological, legal, psychological, and sociological points of view may be distinguished. Politics and war. The political value of war in building empires is extolled in the rock inscriptions of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Rome; more objective histories of the achievements and failures attributable to war can be found in the Homeric and Indian epics, the Bible, and the works of historians from Herodotus through Thucydides and Polybius, to such modern writers as Oman (1885), Delbriick (1900-1936), Nickerson (1933), Montross (1944), Nef (1950), and Fuller (1961). Analytic appraisals of the political value of war can be studied in recent writings by Dulles (1950), Kissinger (1957), Aron (1958), Huntington (1962), and King-Hall (1962). The analysts noted in the section on technology and war (below) have often based their technological analyses on controlling political assumptions and have reached diverse conclusions. Some urge strict observance of the United Nations Charter prohibitions on force or threats, primary attention in policy making to the stability of the world as a whole as the only road to the security of any nation, and policies of tolerance, accommodation, and peaceful coexistence, which are expected to create conditions favorable to general and complete disarmament and the obsolescence of war. Members of this school of thought believe, as did the architects of the League of Nations Covenant and the United Nations Charter, that war has become obsolete as an instrument of policy or as a support for diplomacy. Others believe that the coexistence of countries governed by communism and those governed by free democracy is impossible; these writers advocate elimination of governments that support the
WAR: The Study of War doctrines that they oppose by the use of propaganda, infiltration, subversion, intervention, the organization of alliances, threats of violence, the building of superior military force, or even war. They believe that war continues to be the major instrument of national policy, that superior capability in threatening or using it is necessary for the national interest, and that victory is possible and losses can be made tolerable. A third group of analysts appears to accept both of these positions. They insist that nuclear war would be intolerable; that legal, moral, or rational deterrence cannot be reliable; that such war can be prevented only by mutual nuclear deterrence; that, to this end, nuclear capability must be confined to the present nuclear powers; and that these powers must possess such a supply of nuclearheaded missiles in hardened, mobile, or submarine bases that they will have an invulnerable secondstrike capability, thus making a first strike suicidal and therefore incredible. Most members of this group agree, however, that threats of force, even of nuclear force, are necessary instruments of policy to be used in crises such as that over Berlin or Cuba and that in the national interest states must not only possess such weapons but must make potential enemies believe that they might be used in such crises. For this purpose they advocate a counterforce strategy designed to eliminate the enemy's retaliatory capacity. They hope to achieve this by such a superior capability in nuclear weapons, such a pinpointing of the nuclear launching sites of the potential enemy by espionage or observation in the air or in outer space, and such a program of civilian fall-out shelters that a first strike would convince the enemy that retaliation on cities with his reduced capacity would not be effective and that he would have to surrender. This opinion, it has been suggested by the first group, is based on the assumption that threats of nuclear attack can be made incredible and credible at the same time and overlooks the danger that a counterforce strategy may so alarm the potential enemy that, in spite of its probable suicidal effect, he will launch a pre-emptive attack to gain the advantage of a first strike. A fourth group agrees with the first about the need to avoid nuclear war but also agrees with the second about the necessity of armed force as a support for diplomacy and seeks to avoid the dilemma of the third group by making a distinction between nuclear war and conventional war. This fourth school hopes to assure nuclear deterrence not only by limiting the nuclear club by the testban treaty and a treaty preventing nuclear prolif-
461
eration and by developing an invulnerable secondstrike capability in all the nuclear powers but also by making a no-nuclear-first-strike agreement and refraining from civilian defense policies likely to suggest a counterforce first-strike strategy. With this policy they anticipate that the cities of each nuclear power will be a hostage against a first nuclear strike and a guarantee of the no-first-strike agreement. At the same time this school would increase conventional armed forces and means for their transport, maintain alliances, and develop policies of flexible or graduated deterrence, so that vulnerable frontiers can be defended from conventional attack and governments vulnerable to infiltration or subversion can be protected against guerrillas and infiltrators. This school of thought, however, often approaches the position of the third group by advocating the use of tactical nuclear weapons as a possible step in graduated deterrence, thus breaking down the distinction that in principle they insist upon between nuclear and conventional war. Economics and war. A majority of capitalistic economists have considered competitive free trade a guarantee of peace, while Marxians have regarded the capitalistic economic system as the major cause of war in modern times. Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Richard Cobden, Cordell Hull, and others have argued that free economic competition in the domestic field stimulates production and distributes the product to all, whether capitalists, workers, managers, or entrepreneurs, in proportion to their contribution to the productive process, thus assuring economic justice and domestic tranquillity. In the international field, such writers have argued that free trade would assure a geographic division of labor, maximizing the production of all states and creating a world economy in which each state is dependent on international trade, thus constituting a hostage against war because war is certain to disrupt the natural and economically advantageous movements of commodities, investments, labor, and management. Free-enterprise economists have also argued that the rising prosperity of all under their system and the increased influence of the economic mind over the military mind would divert opinion and policy from military preparation and political expansion and would assure both the motives and the means for family planning, thus keeping economic production ahead of population growth. On the other hand, they have argued that governmental intervention in the economy by protective tariffs, quotas, or other measures to promote national industries for which the country is not well adapted or to
462
WAR: The Study of War
develop industries augmenting military capability, retard the rate of economic progress. Actual governmental operation of the economy, as urged by the socialists, would, they insist, subordinate the economic motive of supplying consumer demands to the political motive of increasing the power of the state. It would tend to create self-contained economies in which political boundaries constituted economic barriers perpetuating or augmenting differential levels of living among the different countries, particularly as the poorer countries, without the knowledge or means of population control, would develop according to the Malthusian law and get continually poorer. From such arguments Herbert Spencer divided countries into the "industrial," with free economies favoring peace, and the "military," with government-controlled economies preparing for war. Marx's successors in the international field elaborated his views, using the argument that as the exploitation of labor proceeded, the domestic market would decline and the capitalists would of necessity embark upon imperial expansion to find new markets, new sources of raw material, and new labor to exploit. Lenin, in his book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, expressed the opinion that such expansionist policies arose more from the greed than from the necessities of the capitalistic entrepreneurs; but whatever the motive, communists argued that capitalistic expansionism led first to imperial war to conquer underdeveloped peoples and then to wars among the capitalist nations themselves arising from rivalry over colonies or commercial privileges. Turning from these theoretical arguments, scholars like Lewis Richardson have examined the actual causes of war and have found that economic factors have been of relatively little importance. From a statistical analysis of wars between 1820 and 1949, Richardson found that economic causes figured directly in less than 29 per cent and have been more important in small than in large wars. He listed the economic factors that have influenced the outbreak of hostilities in this order: taxation of colonial and minority peoples; economic assistance to an enemy; restriction on movements of capital, trade, and migration; and dissatisfaction of soldiers. On the other hand, claims of investors from capitalist countries in undeveloped countries have usually been settled by diplomacy or arbitration and have not led to hostilities unless linked with existing political or ideological conflicts; and differentials in wealth of nations or classes have been of very little influence (Richardson 1960a, pp. xi, 207-210).
Economic factors have had some indirect influence; they have sometimes been significant in hostilities immediately induced by ideological enthusiasm or political ambition. Population pressure, which produces progressive impoverishment, has had little influence in producing war unless accompanied by increased knowledge of economic differentials and by inciting propaganda. In recent times, such propaganda has induced the "revolution of rising expectations" and the "north-south problem," thus dividing the world between the economically developed and largely industrialized areas of Europe, North America, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand and the economically underdeveloped and mostly agricultural countries of Latin America, Asia, and Africa. It appears, however, that the revolutionary urge in the latter countries has been primarily for political independence, racial equality, and the elimination of all forms of colonialism. The demand for economic progress has not often induced hostilities unless linked with a revolutionary ideology. States have used force to acquire economic resources not primarily to elevate the level of living of their populations but to acquire raw materials for war manufactures, or to obtain a population from which soldiers may be recruited, or to annex productive areas, thereby rendering the state less dependent on international trade and less vulnerable to blockade. Similarly, states have in the past more often sought international influence than increased economic prosperity and have directed the development of their domestic economies purely to increase their power positions. The priority of political over economic motives is indicated by the contradictory propaganda of Mussolini before World War n—demanding colonies as an outlet to overpopulation but at the same time stimulating population growth in Italy by giving bounties to large families. Wars—civil, imperial, and international—have been fought by states with tribal, agrarian, feudal, capitalistic, and communistic economies, but there is both historical and statistical evidence that states with a capitalistic economy have been the least belligerent, although because of their superior technology, their wars have been the most destructive (Wright [1942] 1965, p. 1165). Recognizing the value of competitive free-enterprise economies for increasing production, for stimulating invention, and for preserving individual freedom, and recognizing the value of state action for initiating largescale enterprises of social but not business value and for preventing depressions and exploitations, especially of the underprivileged, most states, both
WAR: The Study of War developed and developing, have in recent times tended to maintain "mixed economies" with complementary public and private sectors. A convergence of communist and capitalist economies has also been observed. Civil strife has sometimes induced international war (as did the Protestant Reformation and the American, French, and Russian revolutions) and military interventions (as by the United States in Vietnam); but ideological and political factors were more important than conflict of economic classes in the causation of such civil strife. On the other hand, international war has often led to revolution and civil strife among participants suffering from its economic ravages, especially if influenced by its political propaganda. This was true of the Napoleonic Wars in Spain and central Europe, of World War i in Russia, and of World War n in eastern Europe and China. In sum, studies of both the direct and indirect influence of economic factors on the causation of war indicate that they have been much less important than political ambitions, ideological convictions, technological change, legal claims, irrational psychological complexes, ignorance, and unwillingness to maintain conditions of peace in a changing world. Economists who are not committed to dogmatic theory have usually looked upon war as the most uneconomic enterprise in which man can engage. They have found that the economic gains from victory seldom compensate for the costs of war and the losses of trade (ibid., p. 1367, in reference to the work of Norman Angell, Lionel Robbins, et al.) and that the continuing costs of colonial administration and defense usually exceed the economic value of colonies, if the nation as a whole is considered. Adam Smith, writing in 1776, thought it would be to the economic advantage of the British people to get rid of their colonies, and more recent economists have generalized this opinion, although recognizing that arms makers, investors, and colonial administrators have sometimes profited from war and imperialism (ibid., pp. 1134, 1173 ff., citing Grover Clark, M. M. Knight, et al.). War, they suggest, springs from irrational illusions or unreasonable fears rather than from economic calculations, and they point out that the economically minded have increasingly opposed wars and imperialistic adventures as military technology has increased the destructiveness of war (ibid., p. 1179, citing Eugene Staley, Jacob Viner, Lionel Robbins, et al.). Few, if any, see any possible economic advantage in a nuclear war. NonMarxian economists, therefore, regarding their dis-
463
cipline as a guide to rational action to achieve economic ends, usually consider war outside their field. Wars have not arisen, as is sometimes said, from the struggle among peoples for the limited resources provided by nature. Even animals of the same species maintain their existence more by cooperation than by lethal struggle. Among men, with their greater capacity to relate means to ends, competition for economic resources, if not influenced by political loyalties and ambitions, ideological commitments, or psychological illusions, has led to cooperation in larger groups and larger areas. Technology and war. The technology, tactics, and strategy of war have been discussed by both soldiers and historians interested in how to win a war, as for example in the Roman classics of Caesar and Vegetius, the Renaissance and eighteenth-century works of Machiavelli and Vauban, the post-Napoleonic treatises by Clausewitz (18321834) and Jomini, the nineteenth-century works of Admiral Mahan, and the more recent writings of Marshal Foch (1903), General Bernhardi, and General Taylor (1960). Recent contributors to the technological approach have been less concerned with how to win a war than with how to eliminate stalemate or limit war. Some, like Russell (1959), Speier (1929-1951), and Millis (Millis & Real 1963), have written in the tradition of Erasmus, who found war contrary to human nature, and in the tradition of Bloch (1898), who thought the military technology of the late nineteenth century made war intolerable and who influenced Tsar Nicholas n to call the first Hague Peace Conference. Among writers impressed by the dangers of modern military technology but favoring control rather than elimination of war are Brodie (1959), Bull (1961), Kahn (1960), Kissinger (1957), Liddell-Hart (1946), Morgenstern (1959), Osgood (1957), and Schelling (Schelling & Halperin 1961). These writers believe that deterrence or limitation is technologically possible by the establishment of a stable balance of military power in the nuclear age, but, as suggested in the previous section, their proposals vary according to their appraisals of the political value of war. A balance of military power has in the past always depended on moderate stability in military technology and on occasional wars to make the threat of war (which is the essence of its functioning) credible, but since modern weapons systems change rapidly and since one nuclear war might end civilization, these conditions are hardly applicable to the nuclear age and have resulted in the great confusion already noted about the relation between war and
464
WAR: The Study of War
international politics, between nuclear and conventional weapons, and between the credibility and incredibility of threats. Mathematicians have analyzed the variables that make arms races, a characteristic of balance-ofpower politics, tend to war or to stability. Richardson (1960a, pp. 12 ff., 282; Wright [1942] 1965, p. 1482) concluded that the factors of increasing costs and continuing grievances in the process of reciprocal arms-building were not usually sufficient to prevent the arms race from heading toward war, thus making the participants less and less secure the more they arm. He recognized that his equations would not predict the actual course of an arms race if statesmen paused to think instead of pursuing customary action and reaction patterns. Others, such as Joynt (1964, pp. 23 ff.), operating on the same assumptions concerning patterns of government decision making, have pointed out that if consideration is given to such factors as disparity in industrial capacity and in resources available, the possibility of alternative weapons systems, and the relation between the cost and destructiveness of weapons systems, an arms race may move toward a high degree of stability. All such studies, seeking prediction from the technological point of view, are criticized by students who believe the problem is not technological but psychological. The assumption that statesmen do not pause to think eliminates the complex of motives, rational and irrational, and the images of the total situation, accurate and distorted, that actually control the decisions of men and governments. To reduce all this to physical entities neglects the essence of the problem. Law and war. At the opposite extreme from the technologists are the writers who seek to appraise and control war by standards of law, ethics, and religion. Such efforts were made by Hebrew, Greek, and Roman writers, and particularly by medieval theologians and jurists who elaborated a complicated theory of "just war" for the guidance of statesmen. St. Augustine, Isidore of Seville, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Johannes Legnano insisted that a war to be just must have just causes (defense against attack, punishment of crime, or reparation for injury), that its motive must be to establish justice, that its consequences must be such as to contribute more to vindicating justice than to committing injustices, and that, in any case, it must be initiated only by proper authority and conducted only by proper means. Among the classical international lawyers the "naturalists" (Victoria, Suarez, Pufendorf) accepted this theory, but the "positivists"
(Ayala, Gentili) and the "eclectics" (Grotius, Vattel) did so with the qualification that in practice war was considered a prerogative of sovereign states and that positive law was not concerned with its initiation but only with its conduct. Nineteenth-century international jurists also generally took this position as have some recent writers (Stone 1954), although many recognize that international war has been outlawed and that hostilities are permissible only in individual or collective self-defense against armed attack or under authorization or permission of the United Nations or other proper international authority (Jessup 1956; Wright 1961; Brownlie 1963). Thus, like the medieval jurists, modern scholars have considered both the conditions justifying resort to war (jus ad bellum) and the methods by which it may properly be waged (jus in bello}, but with different conclusions. This voluminous literature has been examined in histories of international law by such writers as T. E. Holland, Luigi Sturzo, Alfred Vanderpol, Robert Regout, John Eppstein, Angelo Sereni, Thomas A. Walker, William Ballis, and Arthur Nussbaum. Studies from the legal point of view are based on the assumption that man is a rational animal, an assumption that has been denied not only by the mechanists like Machiavelli, Hobbes, and the modern advocates of deterrence, who believe that men and governments will blindly pursue greed, ambition, and custom unless faced by superior force, but also by psychologists who emphasize the influence of subconscious, unconscious, and other irrational factors in human behavior. Psychology and war. An increasing number of writers have considered war as a psychological rather than a technological problem, and contributions have been made to the field by students of opinion (Gabriel Almond, Karl Deutsch, Bernard Berelson), of conflict and tension (Georg Simmel, Hadley Cantril, Otto Klineberg, Frederick Dunn, Kenneth Boulding), of political psychology (Harold Lasswell, David Riesman, Charles Osgood, Anatol Rapoport, Ranyard West), and by psychoanalysts (Franz Alexander, Erich Fromm, Robert Waelder). These writers have emphasized the influence of psychological complexes, such as ambivalence, displacement, scapegoating, frustration, identification, and projection, in creating aggressiveness and the role of false images and stereotypes in developing fears and anxieties. These psychic syndromes, observed in individual behavior, may figure in the decision-making process of states. Although seeming to emerge from objective, rational considera-
WAR: The Study of War tion of detailed intelligence reports and analytical studies, decisions are greatly influenced by the decision makers' unconscious and irrational patterns. Indeed, such patterns may be even more influential in public opinion, which greatly influences decision makers, especially in times of high tension, than they are in the behavior of an individual. The growth of aggressive tendencies in governments, the development of international feuds, the emergence of crisis periods, and the conviction of the inevitability of war leading to self-fulfilling prophecies, as well as miscalculation in the adaptation of means to ends, may be attributable to such psychic complexes among leaders and peoples. Writers aware of the psychological roots of behavior emphasize the role of research and education in promoting understanding of the problem of war and in creating conditions in which peaceful solutions may be possible. Just as psychoanalysts believe that awareness of conditions leading to neurotic behavior may effect a cure, so these scholars suggest that states operating on the basis of a schizophrenic culture, false images of the world and of other states, excessive identification with rigid ideologies, or an aggressive disposition derived from a history of frustration and humiliation may be cured by becoming aware of their illusions. Sociology and war. Proposals to eliminate, control, or limit war through organization of the entire community, including all potential belligerents, were put forward in the Middle Ages by Dante, who urged universal empire, by Pope Boniface vm, who urged universal acceptance of Christianity under authority of the church, and by Pierre Dubois, who urged the establishment of a continuing conference of princes to maintain peace among themselves and to recover the Holy Land. In later times such organization to end war has been developed by King George of Podebrad, Emeric Cruce, William Penn, Jeremy Bentham, and Immanuel Kant; by practical statesmen during the Napoleonic period; in the debates at the Hague conferences; and in the formation and operation of the League of Nations and the United Nations. Such proposals and organizations are based upon a sociological analysis of the causes of war and the conditions of peace. In recent times social and political scientists have made numerous studies of international relations, international organization, international conflict, international arbitration, disarmament, the causes of war, and the conditions of peace from the sociological point of view. The works of Inis Claude, Amitai Etzioni, Seymour Melman, Leland Goodrich, Arthur Hoi-
465
combe, Frederick Schuman, Grenville Clark, Louis Sohn, John Strachey, Coral Bell, and Lincoln Bloomfield are representative. These writers, differing from the Neo-Darwinian sociologists, do not believe war inevitable; they believe that governments, like men, are influenced by a great variety of factors including conscience, custom, and reason as well as compulsion. Decision in a particular situation is arrived at through processes of information gathering, analysis, evaluation, and consultation—all influenced by the decision maker's images, assumptions, and prejudices. Sociological studies attempt to merge the analysis of the causes and conditions productive of war with the proposal of measures by which these conditions may be modified and conditions of peace established. They usually realize that the deterministic assumptions underlying predictive formulations are inconsistent with the voluntaristic assumptions underlying constructive decision making. The two may be merged, however, by comparison of the probable consequences of various alternative proposals permitting evaluation and rational choice. The significance of war Consideration of the changing popular and legal conceptions of war, of the history of its technology, causes, and functions from primitive times to the present, and of appraisals by ancient and modern writers of its political rationality and possible control indicate that war has been a phenomenon of very varied significance in human experience. It has varied in frequency, destructiveness, function, and interpretation. Europe was in comparative peace during the Pax Romana of the Antonine Caesars, the Pax Ecclesiae of the Middle Ages, and the Pax Britannica of the nineteenth century, but before each of these periods there was almost continuous war: before the first period, the imperial expansions of Macedonia and Rome; before the second, the barbarian, Muslim, and Viking attacks on the decaying Roman Empire; and before the third, the religious, dynastic, and nationalistic wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In modern European history the seventeenth and twentieth centuries have been the most bloody—the nineteenth, the least bloody. However, this was not true in the Americas, Asia, and Africa. There has been a similar variability among states. Sweden has been at peace for a century and a half but was among the most warlike of states in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The great powers have been at war much more frequently than the smaller powers. In the first
466
WAR: The Study of War
third of the twentieth century the great powers averaged more than one military campaign a year while the Scandinavian countries participated in only one campaign in the entire period, and other lesser powers engaged in not more than one campaign every three years (Wright [1942] 1965, pp. 220 ff., 628). The destructiveness of war has varied tremendously with changes in technology from the spear and the arrow to the airborne or missile-borne nuclear bomb. The proportion of population directly engaged in war has varied from less than 5 per cent in the armies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to almost the entire adult population engaged either at the front or in transportation and productive services for war during World War n. The efficiency of medical services has greatly decreased the ravages of disease in armies and of war-borne disease in civilian populations. Through much of history flea-borne typhus was more dangerous to armies than the enemy. Tactics have varied tremendously from the sudden brief raids of primitive people to the infrequent battles and sieges of disciplined armies in historic war and the continuous wars of attrition in recent times. All these changes have greatly affected the impact of war on population. Among the more warlike primitive people direct losses from war have been estimated at from 6 to 11 per cent of all deaths, and in modern Europe such losses appear to have accounted for 2 to 3 per cent of all deaths. However, if deaths from war-borne diseases and civilian attacks were included, the figure would be much larger, probably some 10 per cent of all deaths in the first half of the twentieth century (ibid., pp. 212, 242, 569). War has at times functioned politically to integrate tribes into feudal principalities and to integrate kingdoms into empires, but it has also served to disintegrate kingdoms and states into feuding cities, and empires into hostile nations. It has at times stimulated science, invention, and the arts, and at other times it has destroyed civilizations and initiated dark ages in which science and values deteriorated. In general, however, the advance of a civilization in science, technology, social services, democratic values, and the administration of justice has created conditions in which war is more likely to deteriorate the quality of life than to improve it. As a result of these varied impacts of war, its appraisal has varied greatly among different peoples and at different periods of history. The founders of the great religions, particularly of Christianity, appraised war negatively. Pacifism has been com-
mon among adherents of Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, and Christianity. Negative appraisals and pacifistic movements have been common after great and destructive wars, as illustrated by the plays of Euripides and Aristophanes, by the philosophies of the Stoics, the medieval scholastics, and the humanists of the Renaissance, and by the peace societies organized after the Napoleonic Wars and the two world wars. There have, however, been militarists, imperialists, extreme nationalists, and Neo-Darwinians who have appraised war as the dynamic force of progress. International lawyers appraised war as a possible instrument of justice in the Middle Ages, as a prerogative of sovereignty in the Renaissance, as a fact that the law could not appraise but might ameliorate in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and increasingly, in the twentieth century, as a crime. At most times most people have regarded war as a human problem like famine, pestilence, and crime with varying degrees of skepticism or optimism as to its control, thus differing from primitive peoples, who have regarded all of these phenomena as visitations of supernatural power beyond human control. The control of war A review of the various studies of war suggests that the problem of war cannot be solved by developing the art of war but only by developing the art of peace. War has been "natural" in the sense that it has been the probable consequence of the proximity of self-determining systems of action, each of which guides its behavior by internally generated interests and motivations, with little understanding or concern for the probable reactions of others. Peace on the other hand is "artificial" because its maintenance depends on a general desire to maintain it, on a correct image of the world as one whole, and on the guidance of political decisions and actions by sound psychological, sociological, political, economic, and technological knowledge of the probable reaction of each of the systems of action able to precipitate hostilities. Only by the application of such knowledge in continually changing conditions can the natural hubris of the sovereign state be enlightened by the themis of reason, reconciling liberty and independence with stability and peace through continuous concern by all for international justice. No gadget of organization or ideology will solve the problem. Continuous research is necessary to increase understanding of international relations in the rapidly changing, interdependent, and universally vulnerable world of nations with different values, traditions, institutions, and political and economic
WAR: The Study of War structures. No less important is continuous education, in order to spread this understanding among peoples and statesmen, inducing them to accept the image of the world inherent in such understanding. Furthermore, there must be continuous activity in order to develop international law, the structure and operation of international organizations, and the foreign-policy-making processes of states, so that a world of peacefully coexisting states may gradually emerge. Continuous activity on the scientific, legal, educational, and political fronts, stimulated by widespread understanding that nuclear war would be intolerable, may create a stable, progressive, and reasonably satisfactory world in which, while conflict may be expected, war in the ordinary, as well as the legal, sense will have become obsolete. QUINCY WRIGHT BIBLIOGRAPHY ARON, RAYMOND (1958) 1959 On War. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. -> First published as De la guerre. ARON, RAYMOND (1962) 1967 Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. -> First published as Paix et guerre entre les nations. BLOCK, JAN G. (1898) 1914 The Future of War in Its Technical, Economic, and Political Relations. Boston: Ginn. -» First published as Budushchaia voina v tekhnicheskom, ekonomicheshorn i politicheskom otnosheniiakh. BOULDING, KENNETH E. 1962 Conflict and Defense: A General Theory. A publication of the Center for Research in Conflict Resolution at the University of Michigan. New York: Harper. BRODIE, BERNARD 1959 Strategy in the Missile Age. Princeton Univ. Press. BROWNLIE, IAN 1963 International Law and the Use of Force by States. Oxford: Clarendon. BULL, HEDLEY (1961) 1965 The Control of the Arms Race: Disarmament and Arms Control in the Missile Age. 2d ed. New York: Praeger. CANTRIL, HADLEY (editor) 1950 Tensions That Cause War. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press. CLAUSEWITZ, KARL VON (1832-1834) 1943 On War. New York: Modern Library. -» First published in German. DA VIE, MAURICE R. 1929 The Evolution of War: A Study of Its Role in Early Societies. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. DELBRUCK, HANS 1900-1936 Geschichte der Kriegskunst. 7 vols. Berlin: Stilke. DULLES, JOHN FOSTER (1950) 1957 War or Peace. New York: Macmillan. DUNN, FREDERICK 1950 War and the Minds of Men. New York: Harper. FOCH, FERDINAND (1903) 1920 Principles of War. New York: Holt. -> First published as Des principes de la guerre. FULLER, J. F. C. 1961 The Conduct of War, 1789-1961: A Study of the Impact of the French, Industrial, and Russian Revolutions on War and Its Conduct. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press.
467
HUNTINGTON, SAMUEL P. (editor) 1962 Changing Patterns of Military Politics. New York: Free Press. JAMES, WILLIAM (1910) 1911 The Moral Equivalent of War. Pages 265-296 in William James, Memories and Studies. New York: Longmans. JESSUP, PHILIP C. 1956 Transnational Law. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. JOYNT, C. B. 1964 Arms Races and the Problem of Equilibrium. Yearbook of World Affairs, 1964 18:2340. KAHN, HERMAN (1960) 1961 On Thermonuclear War. 2d ed. Princeton Univ. Press. KING-HALL, STEPHEN 1962 Power Politics in the Nuclear Age. London: Gallancz. KISSINGER, HENRY A. 1957 Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy. New York: Harper. LIDDELL HART, B. H. (1946) 1947 The Revolution in Warfare. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. MILLIS, WALTER; and REAL, JAMES 1963 The Abolition of War. New York: Macmillan. MONTROSS, LYNN (1944) 1960 War Through the Ages. 3d ed., rev. & enl. New York: Harper. MORGENSTERN, OSKAR 1959 The Question of National Defense. New York: Random House. -> A paperback edition was published in 1961 by Vintage. MORRISON, C. C. 1927 The Outlawry of War: A Constructive Policy for World Peace. Chicago: Willett. NEF, JOHN U. 1950 War and Human Progress: An Essay on the Rise of Industrial Civilization. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. -» A paperback edition was published in 1963 by Harper as Western Civilization Since the Renaissance. NICKERSON, HOFFMAN (1933) 1934 Can We Limit War? New York: Stokes. NOEL-BAKER, PHILIP J. (1958) 1959 The Arms Race: A Programme for World Disarmament. London: Stevens. OMAN, CHARLES W. C. (1885) 1963 The Art of War in the Middle Ages: A.D. 378-1515. Ithaca, N.Y.: Great Seal. OMAN, CHARLES W. C. 1937 A History of the Art of War in the Sixteenth Century. London: Methuen; New York: Dutton. OSGOOD, ROBERT E. 1957 Limited War: The Challenge to American Strategy. Univ. of Chicago Press. RAPOPORT, ANATOL 1960 Fights, Games, and Debates. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press. RENAN, ERNEST 1871 La reforme intellectuelle et morale. Paris: Michel-Levy. -> The translation of the extract in the text was provided by Quincy Wright. RICHARDSON, LEWIS F. 1960a Statistics of Deadly Quarrels. Edited by Quincy Wright and C. C. Lienau. Pittsburgh: Boxwood. RICHARDSON, LEWIS F. 1960£> Arms and Insecurity: A Mathematical Study of the Causes and Origins of War. Edited by Nicolas Rashevsky and Ernesto Trucco. Pittsburgh: Boxwood; Chicago: Quadrangle. RUSSELL, BERTRAND 1959 Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare. New York: Simon & Schuster. SCHELLING, THOMAS C.; and HALPERIN, MORTON H. 1961 Strategy and Arms Control. New York: Twentieth Century Fund. SPAULDING, OLIVER L.; NICKERSON, HOFFMAN; and WRIGHT, JOHN W. 1925 Warfare: A Study of Military Methods From the Earliest Times. New York: Harcourt.
468
WAR: Primitive Warfare
SPEIER, HANS (1929-1951) 1952 Social Order and the Risks of War: Papers in Political Sociology, New York: Stewart. -» Four of these papers (chapters 5, 11, 12, 13) were first published in German magazines. Chapter 6 is based upon an unpublished manuscript written in German. STONE, JULIUS (1954) 1959 Legal Controls of International Conflict: A Treatise on the Dynamics of Disputes- and War-law. 2d impression, rev. New York: Rinehart. -> Includes a supplement covering the years 1953 to 1958. STRACHEY, JOHN (1962) 1963 On the Prevention of War. New York: St. Martins. TAYLOR, MAXWELL D. 1960 The Uncertain Trumpet. New York: Harper. WRIGHT, QUINCY (1942) 1965 A Study of War. 2d ed. Univ. of Chicago Press. WRIGHT, QUINCY 1961 The Role of International Law in the Elimination of War. New York: Oceana. WRIGHT, QUINCY; EVAN, WILLIAM M.; and DEUTSCH, MORTON (editors) 1962 Preventing World War III: Some Proposals. New York: Simon & Schuster. II PRIMITIVE WARFARE
War among nonliterate peoples ranges from the hit-and-run raids and ambuscades of warriors from autonomous local communities of primitive horticulturalists or hunters and gatherers to the military campaigns carried out by the armies of such stateorganized societies as the old African kingdoms and the Inca empire of the New World. The different modes of organized armed conflict encountered among nonliterate peoples have been studied by social scientists engaged in a variety of enterprises, but the present article is confined for the most part to a discussion of the functioning of war among nonliterate peoples. In the study of war, functional analysis, understood as the analysis of the regulation of some particular variable by other variables (Brown 1963, pp. 110-112; Leeds 1963), is applicable if war can be viewed as either a regulated or a regulating variable. It has been viewed as a regulated variable in a number of anthropological studies. Military deterrence resulting from the achievement of a balance of power among territorial segments of nonstate-organized African societies has been emphasized by Fortes and Evans-Pritchard (1940). Other scholars have seen war between potentially hostile primitive communities as being limited by the formation of intercommunity ties of one kind or another, for example, the ties resulting from intermarriage, commerce, conquest, or fictions of common descent. Colson (1953) and Gluckman (1963), in their studies of African societies, have called particular attention to the pacifying effect of a division of the loyalties of individuals between territorial and kinship groups; that is, rather than
joining coresidents in fighting against kinsmen or joining kinsmen in fighting against coresidents, individuals with divided loyalties tend to work for peaceful settlements of conflicts. Summary discussions of the role of intercommunity ties in regulating warfare may be found in works by Davie (1929, chapter 15), LeVine (1961), and Poirier (1961). However, that there can easily be a severing of intercommunity ties and a renewal of hostilities in at least some primitive societies is indicated in some detailed studies of war among particular nonliterate peoples, including the Maori of New Zealand (Vayda 1960) and the Huli of New Guinea (Glasse 1959). There is a need for further investigation of the conditions under which particular kinds of intercommunity ties either are or are not effective in limiting warfare. When war is considered not as a regulated but rather as a regulating variable, we may examine a number of possible functions of war, that is, its regulation of a number of different variables or kinds of variables. Regulation of psychological variables. The role of warfare in keeping such psychological variables as anxiety, tension, and aggressiveness under control has been emphasized by a number of writers who have viewed primitive wars as being "flightfrom-grief" devices (Turney-High 1949), as "enabling a people to give expression to anger caused by a disturbance of the internal harmony" (Wedgwood 1930, p. 33), and as serving to divert intrasocietal hostility onto substitute objects (Coser 1956, cited in Murphy 1957, p. 1032). Related to the emphasis on the regulation of psychological variables is the view of some anthropologists that games and other ritualized rivalrous contests may be functional alternatives to war, since they may also provide release from emotions and tensions (Berndt 1957, p. 50; Murdock 1956; Scotch 1961; Stern 1950, pp. 96 ff.). Writers concerned with relating primitive war to psychological variables usually support their generalizations with some reference to data on particular nonliterate peoples and their fighting. For example, Whiting (1944, p. 142) noted the case of a New Guinea tribesman who organized a raid because his wife had made his "belly hot with anger" by taunting him. This is presented by Whiting as an illustration of how aggression generated within the tribe may be displaced to an out-group. On the whole, however, it may be said that there has been no notable success thus far in correlating any reliable measures or indexes of tensions and other emotional states with the occurrence or non-
WAR: Primitive Warfare occurrence of war at particular times among particular nonliterate peoples. It may be concluded, therefore, that the psychological functions of primitive war (that is, its regulation of psychological variables)—and, for that matter, its functional equivalence to games—have not been proved. Some anthropologists, committed to the school of interpretation called "culturology," have argued that these functions do not need to be considered, because, in their view, the fact that war is a struggle between societies and not between individuals makes the psychological states of individuals irrelevant to the question of whether or not war will take place (Newcomb 1950; I960; White 1949, pp. 129-134). Other anthropologists (for example, Vayda 1961; Leeds 1963), while not denying that war may have psychological functions, have argued against regarding these as the only, or necessarily the primary, functions of primitive hostilities. Certain functions that may be more sociopolitical than psychological in character may, for example, be important. Regulation of the exercise of authority. In their studies of African kingdoms, a number of British social anthropologists have emphasized the functions of civil or intrasocietal war in checking abuses of political power and have viewed rebellions as "defenses of the kingship against the king" (Beattie 1959; Gluckman 1963; Worsley 1961). Rebellions have been found to have similar functions in nonliterate societies in other parts of the world, including some Polynesian societies that were organized into chiefdoms rather than into states or kingdoms. Here the chiefs had duties in allocating goods, resources, and labor; rebellions apparently could arise when the chiefs made the allocations according to whim or for their own benefit rather than for that of their people. A number of instances of such rebellions are cited by Sahlins (1963). Regulation of relations with other groups. The regulatory functions that primitive war may have in the relations between politically independent groups are discernible in much of what has been called "fighting for revenge," for example, such as has been reported from numerous primitive societies of swidden or shifting (slash-and-burn) agriculturalists in various parts of the world (see the references in Vayda 1960, p. 2) and even from some of the simplest societies of hunters and gatherers (Hobhouse 1956). These societies lack a central government with penal jurisdiction over the separate local groups. In such circumstances, the punishment for offenses by members of one group against members of another—and, presum-
469
ably, the deterrence of more such offenses—may be effected by fighting and killing undertaken by the offended group to avenge the insult, theft, nonpayment of bride price, abduction, rape, poaching, trespass, wounding, killing, or other offense committed. Certainly such retaliatory fighting may satisfy an aggrieved people's need for revenge, but it would be a mistake to emphasize this function to the exclusion of the role that the fighting may play in maintaining the integrity of groups and their possessions. Regulation of the distribution of goods and resources. In cases where territorial expansion and the subjugation and economic exploitation of conquered people were the results of warfare waged by such state-organized societies as those of ancient Peru and Mexico (Bram 1941; Wolf 1959), the effects of warfare on the distribution of goods and resources are not difficult to specify. In the warfare of societies that lack state organization, such effects are often less apparent and have in fact been declared, by such scholars as Wright (1942, pp. 73-74) and Steward and Shimkin ([1961] 1962, p. 79), to be either uncharacteristic or of little importance. These generalizations can hardly be applied, however, to African and Asian pastoralists whose warfare includes stock-raiding activities, which apparently serve to keep within a viable range the number of animals held by each local group (Leeds & Vayda 1965). Even among primitive agricultural people less dependent on so mobile a form of wealth as cattle, camels, or other animals, warriors sometimes take booty (Davie 1929; Vayda 1960), but just how important this is in getting such goods as tools and food distributed between groups is hard to say in the absence of quantitative data on the booty taken. With respect to the regulation of the territorial holdings of groups by means of warfare, it may be noted that there are some regions of primitive culture and stateless societies where the displacement of defeated groups from their land and the occupation of their former territories by their enemies are frequent aftermaths of fighting. A case in point is highland New Guinea (Berndt 1964). At the same time, it is true that the war expeditions or campaigns of many primitive people without state organization often end with no transfers of land. It is this fact that may have led some students to neglect the role of primitive war in the regulation of territorial holdings. However, it is important to note that even in those places where fighting often ends with territories and boundaries remaining intact, it does not always end that way. In such places, the strength of a group success-
470
WAR: Primitive Warfare
ful in defending itself year after year against its enemies may eventually, as a result of economic reverses, disease, or the attrition of recurrent warfare, decline to a point where its capacity for further defense is seriously impaired and where it then must yield territories to a group better able to defend and exploit them. A process very much like this operated among Maori tribes and subtribes (Vayda 1960, p. 110), and there are suggestions of it also from various other primitive swiddening groups (including some who have become famous for their head-hunting) in Oceania and the South American tropical forest (Fernandes 1952, pp. 60-63; Freeman 1955, pp. 25-26; Seligman 1910, p. 196). Regulation of demographic variables. In some societies the functions discussed so far are performed by warfare without much bloodshed or loss of life. A terrifying war dance or the taking of one or two heads can decide a contest and drive an enemy away or deter him, at least temporarily, from aggression. This kind of ritualism makes some of the warfare of primitive human societies comparable not only to such ceremonialized aspects of the threat behavior of modern states as war games and May Day parades but also to the threat behavior of infrahuman animals, which, at times, fulfills the same functions as actual fighting but does so without a maladaptive loss of life (see Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1963; Suttles 1961; Tinbergen 1953; Wynne-Edwards 1962, pp. 129-131). On the other hand, it seems that the warriors of some primitive societies try in their battles to kill as many of the enemy as they can. From New Guinea, for example, there are reports of the extermination of entire groups in warfare. It has been suggested that these more sanguinary modes of primitive war result in some cases from population increase, which exacerbates competition for resources, and that heavy battle mortality under these circumstances prevents population increase from proceeding so far as to lead to an overexploitation and more or less permanent deterioration of resources (see Allan 1949, pp. 25-26; Carneiro 1961, pp. 60-61). In other words, under these circumstances heavy battle mortality can be advantageous in the long run for the populations concerned. In order to define these relationships more precisely, more detailed studies of the demography and ecology of primitive societies must be made. Moreover, the role of psychological variables in mediating the relationships also must be studied. Is it the case, for example, that a diminishing per capita food supply and an increasing intragroup competition for resources generate in-
tense domestic frustrations and other in-group tensions, which must then be released in bloody battle with an enemy group? It may be noted incidentally that the very fact that such questions can be posed points to the necessity for studying the psychological functions of war in conjunction with other possible functions, such as the demographic ones being considered here. Population pressure may be reduced as much through land conquests as through battle mortality in cases where a population whose own land is being filled to its carrying capacity has neighbors with unexploited or underexploited land. Although land transfers as a result of primitive warfare have already been discussed, it is pertinent here to note that for some warlike tribes of primitive agriculturalists in Africa, Oceania, and South America there is evidence of population increase as well as of territorial expansion (Bohannan 1954; Vayda 1961). Sometimes when such increase is a longterm trend, warfare contributes not only to relieving local population pressure but also to maintaining an over-all rate of increase by providing conquered territories into which the population can expand. In much of the primitive world, demographic problems may arise because autonomous local groups are small enough to be subject to considerable fluctuations in size, sex ratio, and age distribution that are a result of chance variations in natality and mortality. In some cases, the taking of war captives is a means of compensating for the effect of such chance variations; the capture of women, in particular, and of children and men, to a somewhat lesser degree, is described in the war narratives of numerous tribes (Davie 1929, pp. 89-102). There is variation from society to society in the treatment of captives and the degree of their incorporation into the captors' social groups, but it should be noted that slavery involving the systematic exploitation of captured or conquered people is rare in the primitive world, where neither food production nor political mechanisms are sufficiently developed for the support and control of an economically productive slave class (Hobhouse et al. [1915] 1930, chapter 4; Nieboer 1900). Prior to the advent of "civilized" slave traders, the warriors of primitive societies without state organization appear to have taken only small numbers of captives. While these could be used for correcting local demographic imbalances, they did not tax locally available food supplies. Multiple functions. The foregoing has not been an exhaustive listing of the possible functions of
WAR: Primitive Warfare primitive war, and it must be emphasized that rigorous empirical validation of the listed functions has thus far been deficient. It does seem to be indicated, however, that primitive war, much as any war, has numerous functions. This must be borne in mind in assessing recommendations for limiting or eradicating warfare with respect to only certain functions, for example, trade as a substitute with respect to economic functions or games as a substitute with respect to tension release. Greater success in achieving peace can be expected when substitutes are provided for fulfilling not just one or the other function but rather the gamut of functions that war apparently has. ANDREW P. VAYDA [See also FEUD; POLITICAL ANTHROPOLOGY.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
ALLAN, WILLIAM 1949 Studies in African Land Usage in Northern Rhodesia. Rhodes-Livingston Papers, No. 15. Oxford Univ. Press. BEATTIE, J. H. M. 1959 Checks on the Abuse of Political Power in Some African States: A Preliminary Framework for Analysis. Sociologus New Series 9:97-115. BERNDT, CATHERINE H. 1957 Social and Cultural Change in New Guinea: Communication and Views About "Other People." Sociologus New Series 7:38-57. BERNDT, RONALD M. 1964 Warfare in the New Guinea Highlands. American Anthropologist New Series 66 (Special Publication) no. 4, part 2:183-203. BOHANNAN, PAUL 1954 The Migration and Expansion of the Tiv. Africa 24:2-16. BRAM, JOSEPH 1941 An Analysis of Inca Militarism, Monographs of the American Ethnological Society, No. 4. New York: Augustin. BROWN, ROBERT R. 1963 Explanation in Social Science. Chicago: Aldine. CARNEIRO, ROBERT L. 1961 Slash-and-burn Cultivation Among the Kuikuru and Its Implications for Cultural Development in the Amazon Basin. Pages 47-67 in Johannes Wilbert (editor), The Evolution of Horticultural Systems in Native South America; Causes and Consequences: A Symposium. Anthropologica Supplement Publication No. 2. Caracas: Sociedad de Ciencias Naturales La Salle. COLSON, ELIZABETH 1953 Social Control and Vengeance in Plateau Tonga Society. Africa 23:199-211. COSER, LEWIS A. 1956 The Functions of Social Conflict. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. DAVIE, MAURICE R. 1929 The Evolution of War: A Study of Its Role in Early Societies. Yale Publications in Economics, Social Science and Government, No. 1. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. EiBL-EiBESFELDT, IRENAUS 1963 Aggressive Behavior and Ritualized Fighting in Animals. Pages 8-17 in Jules H. Masserman (editor), Violence and War: With Clinical Studies. Academy of Psychoanalysis, Science and Psychoanalysis, Vol. 6. New York: Grune & Stratton. FERNANDES, FLORESTAN 1952 A funcao social de guerra na sociedade Tupinamba. Sa5 Paulo, Brazil, Museu Paulista, Revista New Series 6:7-426.
471
FORTES, MEYER; and EVANS-PRITCHARD, E. E. (1940) 1961 Introduction. Pages 1-23 in Meyer Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard (editors), African Political Systems. Oxford Univ. Press. FREEMAN, J. D. 1955 Iban Agriculture: A Report on the Shifting Cultivation of Hill Rice by the Iban of Sarawak. Great Britain, Colonial Office, Colonial Research Studies, No. 18. London: H.M. Stationery Office. GLASSE, ROBERT M. 1959 Revenge and Redress Among the Huli: A Preliminary Account. Mankind 5:273-289. GLUCKMAN, MAX 1963 Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa. New York: Free Press. HOBHOUSE, L. T. 1956 The Simplest Peoples. 2 parts. British Journal of Sociology 7:77-119. -> Part 1: A Comparative Study. Part 2: Peace and Order Among the Simplest Peoples. HOBHOUSE, L. T.; WHEELER, GERALD C.; and GINSBERG, MORRIS (1915) 1930 The Material Culture and Social Institutions of the Simpler Peoples: An Essay in Correlation. London School of Economics and Political Science Monographs on Sociology, No. 3. London: Chapman. LEEDS, ANTHONY 1963 The Functions of War. Pages 69-82 in Jules H. Masserman (editor), Violence and War: With Clinical Studies. Academy of Psychoanalysis, Science and Psychoanalysis, Vol. 6. New York: Grune & Stratton. LEEDS, ANTHONY; and VAYDA, ANDREW P. (editors) 1965 Man, Culture, and Animals: The Role of Animals in Human Ecological Adjustments. Washington: American Association for the Advancement of Science. LEVINE, ROBERT A. 1961 Anthropology and the Study of Conflict: An Introduction. Journal of Conflict Resolution 5:3-15. MIDDLETON, JOHN; and TAIT, DAVID (editors) 1958 Tribes Without Rulers: Studies in African Segmentary Systems. London: Routledge. MURDOCH, GEORGE P. 1956 Political Moieties. Pages 133-147 in Leonard D. White (editor), The State of the Social Sciences. Univ. of Chicago Press. MURPHY, ROBERT F. 1957 Intergroup Hostility and Social Cohesion. American Anthropologist New Series 59:1018-1035. NEWCOMB, W. W. JR. 1950 A Re-examination of the Causes of Plains Warfare. American Anthropologist New Series 52:317-330. NEWCOMB, W. W. JR. 1960 Toward an Understanding of War. Pages 317-336 in Gertrude E. Dole and Robert L. Carneiro (editors), Essays in the Science of Culture: In Honor of Leslie A. White. New York: Crowell. NIEBOER, HERMAN J. (1900) 1910 Slavery as an Industrial System: Ethnological Researches. The Hague: Nijhoff. POIRIER, JEAN 1961 Esquisse d'une ethno-sociologie de la guerre et de la paix dans les societes archaiiques. Part 1, chapter 2, in Societe Jean Bodin pour 1'Histoire Comparative des Institutions, Recueils. Volume 14: La paix. Brussels: Editions de la Librairie Encyclopedique. SAHLINS, MARSHALL D. 1963 Poor Man, Rich Man, Big Man, Chief: Political Types in Melanesia and Polynesia. Comparative Studies in Society and History 5:285-303. SCOTCH, N. A. 1961 Magic, Sorcery, and Football Among Urban Zulu: A Case of Reinterpretation Under Acculturation. Journal of Conflict Resolution 5:70—74. SELIGMAN, C. G. 1910 The Melanesians of British New Guinea. Cambridge Univ. Press.
472
WAR CRIMES
STERN, THEODORE 1950 The Rubber-ball Games of the Americas. Monographs of the American Ethnological Society, No. 17. New York: Augustin. STEWARD, JULIAN H.; and SHIMKIN, DEMITRI B. (1961) 1962 Some Mechanisms of Sociocultural Evolution. Pages 67-87 in Hudson Hoagland and Ralph W. Burhoe (editors), Evolution and Man's Progress. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. SUTTLES, WAYNE 1961 Subhuman and Human Fighting. Anthropologica New Series 3:148—163. TINBERGEN, NiKOLAAs 1953 Fighting and Threat in Animals. New Biology 14:9-24. TURNEY-HIGH, HARRY H. 1949 Primitive War: Its Practice and Concepts. Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press. VAYDA, ANDREW P. 1960 Maori Warfare. Maori Monographs, No. 2. Wellington: Polynesian Society. VAYDA, ANDREW P. 1961 Expansion and Warfare Among Swidden Agriculturalists. American Anthropologist New Series 63:346-358. WEDGWOOD, CAMILLA H. 1930 Some Aspects of Warfare in Melanesia. Oceania 1:5-33. WHITE, LESLIE 1949 The Science of Culture: A Study of Man and Civilization. New York: Farrar, Straus. -> A paperback edition was published in 1958 by Grove. WHITING, J. W. M. 1944 The Frustration Complex in Kwoma Society. Man 44:140-144. WOLF, ERIC R. 1959 Sons of the Shaking Earth. Univ. of Chicago Press. WORSLEY, PETER M. 1961 The Analysis of Rebellion and Revolution in Modern British Social Anthropology. Science and Society 25:26-37. WRIGHT, QUINCY (1942) 1965 A Study of War. 2d ed. Univ. of Chicago Press. WYNNE-EDWARDS, V. C. 1962 Animal Dispersion in Relation to Social Behaviour. Edinburgh and London: Oliver & Boyd; New York: Hafner.
WAR CRIMES See INTERNATIONAL CRIMES. WARD, JAMES James Ward (1843-1925), British psychologist and philosopher, was born in Hull and spent his childhood near Liverpool. Owing to a financial crisis in the family, he left school at the age of 13 and two years later was apprenticed to an architect. From architecture he turned to theology, and at 20 he entered training for the ministry of the Congregational church. A scholarship gave him the chance to go to Germany, where he again changed fields, this time from theology, at Berlin, to philosophy, at Gottingen. Lotze's lectures at Gottingen influenced him greatly. Returning to England in 1870, Ward preached in Cambridge for a year and then won a competitive scholarship in moral sciences to Trinity College. He was elected to a fellowship in 1875, which he held for fifty years. During this time, through his writings and through his influence upon such men as Stout, McDougall, and Bartlett, he played
a vital part in the development of psychological thought in Britain. Although Ward was essentially a philosophical psychologist, his early work was related to the physiological aspects of his subject. Thus, when he returned to Germany for a period in 1876 to work in Carl Ludwig's laboratory in Leipzig, he published an article titled "An Attempt to Interpret Fechner's Law" (1876). Even more directly concerned with physiology were two papers based on his work at Cambridge, "Some Notes on the Physiology of the Nervous System of the Fresh-water Crayfish" (1879) and "Ueber die Auslosung von Reflexbewegungen durch eine Summe schwacher Reize" (1880). It is necessary to keep this early work in mind when assessing Ward's later, more philosophical contributions: it was not because he lacked the ability to conduct experiments that he became an armchair psychologist. Ward's most influential work was the article "Psychology" in the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1886), later revised and published as Psychological Principles in 1918. In this article he claimed that psychology is the science of experiencing, an activity in which both subject and object are always necessarily implicated. The basic components of this activity are attention and feeling. Mental contents may be either sensory or motor in character, and they occur only as ingredients in a "presentational continuum" from which they cannot be isolated. The structuring of the presentational continuum is dependent on the subject's attention and cannot, therefore, be reduced to the laws of association that were taken for granted by most British psychologists of Ward's time. The novelty of Ward's point of view in British psychology, however, has sometimes been overestimated. Locke had talked about "the acts of the mind wherein it exerts its power over its simple ideas," and the "common-sense" school of Scottish philosophers had denied that we can start, as Hume would have us do, with impressions and ideas. Therefore, in bringing to England some features of the post-Kantian German analysis of mind, Ward did not have to ask his readers to adopt an entirely alien way of thinking. Nonetheless, the clash between his views and the prevalent associationism of Bain and Spencer was a dramatic one. From the ensuing controversy Ward emerged victorious and, for a time at least, changed the pattern of psychological thinking in Britain. Yet the psychology of the self and its acts has proved difficult to establish on an experimental basis. Ward himself was instrumental in introducing experimental psychology at Cambridge, but in
WARD, LESTER F. spite of his own early work, he seems to have later taken the view that psychology cannot really be taken into the laboratory. He felt, however, that a genetic approach might prove valuable. There are those who think that his intervention delayed the growth of scientific psychology in Britain for a generation. Others would claim that by demolishing the atomistic empiricism and associationism of Hume, Hartley, and the Mills, Ward prevented the growth of the more simple-minded forms of learning theory and S—R behaviorism in general, thus enabling British psychology to accommodate more readily recent theories of information processing. JAMES DREVER [For the historical context of Ward's work, see PHENOMENOLOGY; and the biographies of BAIN; HUME; LOCKE; LOTZE; SPENCER; for discussion of the subsequent development of his ideas, see ATTENTION; SELF CONCEPT; and the biographies of BARTLETT; McDoUGALL; STOUT.] WORKS BY WARD
1876
An Attempt to Interpret Fechner's Law. Mind 1: 452-466. 1879 Some Notes on the Physiology of the Nervous System of the Fresh-water Crayfish (Astacus Fluviatilis). Journal of Physiology 2:214-227. 1880 Ueber die Auslosung von Reflexbewegungen durch eine Summe schwacher Reize. Archiv fur Physiologic [1880]: 72-91. 1886 Psychology. Volume 20, pages 37-85 in Encyclopaedia Britannica. 9th ed. Edinburgh: Black. 1899 Naturalism and Agnosticism. 2 vols. New York: Black. (1911) 1920 The Realm of Ends. 3d ed. Cambridge Univ. Press. (1918) 1920 Psychological Principles. 2d ed. Cambridge Univ. Press. 1922 Study of Kant. Cambridge Univ. Press. 1926 Psychology Applied to Education. Cambridge Univ. Press. -> Published posthumously. 1927 Essays in Philosophy. London: Macmillan. -» Published posthumously. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
BARTLETT, F. C. 1925 James Ward: 1843-1925. American Journal of Psychology 36:449-453. SORLEY, W. R. 1926 James Ward: 1843-1925. British Academy, Proceedings 12:306-316. Ward Commemoration Number. 1926 Monist 36, no. 1. -> Contains a bibliography on pages 170-176.
WARD, LESTER F. Although Lester Frank Ward (1841-1913) was eulogized at his death as the last of the giants of nineteenth-century sociology, his influence on later sociology was slight. Despite his keen intellect, encyclopedic knowledge, and prolific writing, his
473
vision of sociology as the scientia scientiarum, as well as his neologistic conceptual apparatus, died with him. Nevertheless, while his books are seldom read and his concepts seldom taught, many of his ideas—the primacy of artificial over natural forces in the development of human society, the psychological rather than the biological basis of human social life, and the stress on process and function rather than on structure in the study of society—provided significant leads for the more modest research that characterized sociology in the generation that succeeded him. Ward's life history represents one version of the American success story: from farm to city, from hand work to head work. His father, whom he described as "a mechanic, a jack-of-all-trades," had moved as a boy from New Hampshire to western New York. In 1840 the family moved to Joliet, Illinois, and it was there that Ward was born, the youngest of ten children. In 1855 the Wards went by covered wagon to Iowa with a quarter-section land warrant. During these years, Ward received the rudiments of an education and learned to love the woods and fields. When his father died in 1857, Ward returned to Illinois with his mother and divided his time between farm work and grammar school. Convinced of the value of an education, Ward read avidly and taught himself Greek, German, French, and La^in. In 1858 he went to Meyersburg, Pennsylvania, to help one of his brothers, who had established a wagon-hub factory there. The venture failed, and Ward turned briefly to school teaching, farmed in the summers, and prepared for college at the Susquehanna Institute. After Lincoln's call for volunteers at the opening of the Civil War, he enlisted in the Union Army, was wounded three times, and was mustered out in 1864. Upon recovering from his wounds, Ward entered government service in 1865. He served as a clerk in the Treasury Department, as chief of the Division of Navigation and Immigration for brief periods, and as librarian of the Bureau of Statistics. In 1867 he began attending evening classes at the Columbian (now George Washington) University, from which he received an A.B. degree in 1869, an LL.B. in 1871, and an M.A. (in botany) in 1872. In 1881 he became an assistant geologist in the U.S. Geological Survey, in charge of paleobotany. He was promoted to geologist in 1883 and became chief paleontologist in 1892. He wrote extensively on botany and geology and served for a short time in the 1880s as professor of botany at the Columbian University. Ward's belief in the value of education moved
474
WARD, LESTER F.
him to write a book that would deal systematically with the importance of education in human society. The book was originally to be called "The Great Panacea," and between 1869 and 1874 most of his spare time was devoted to planning and writing it. However, he came to recognize that the scope of his concern was so wide that extensive reading and scientific study would be necessary if he was to complete his task. Consequently, he devoted a year to reading philosophy and science, especially the works of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel, Auguste Comte, and Herbert Spencer. By 1876 Ward reported the following result of these labors in his notebook: "I had begun to see that what I was writing was sociology, and that I should try to do something original in that science" (Glimpses of the Cosmos, vol. 3, p. 172). He made an entirely new outline, and, after numerous revisions, he completed the manuscript in 1880 and titled it Dynamic Sociology (1883). Ward was repeatedly unsuccessful in his attempts to have his work published. Eventually, he himself subsidized the publication, selling his home to do so. The work contained essentially all his major ideas, and his subsequent writings were either elaborations, clarifications, or (as in his Outlines of Sociology 1898 and A Textbook of Sociology 1905, the latter written in collaboration with James Q. Dealy) condensations of his system of thought. While Dynamic Sociology was neither a popular nor a financial success, it did come to the notice of many sociologists, such as Albion W. Small at Colby College, and it established Ward's reputation as a sociologist, both in his own country and abroad. While still a civil servant, Ward lectured in summer sessions at the University of Wisconsin, the University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins, and Harvard. Finally, in 1906, after more than forty years in government service, he resigned his post to accept an appointment as professor of sociology in the department of social and political science at Brown University. There he continued to teach and write until his death in 1913. Ward's work was influenced both by the advances then being made in the fields of biology, psychology, and anthropology and by the revolutionary social changes that took place in America in the last half of the nineteenth century—industrialization, urbanization, and the rise of monopolistic finance capitalism. The intellectual roots of his thought are found primarily in Comte and Spencer. Indeed, Ward's work can be considered an American version of Comte's positivism, combined with Spencer's cosmic application of the theory of evolution. Although Ward's sociology was
not fruitful in the development of social science, it did at least provide a rationale, couched in scientific terminology, for the spirit of reform so characteristic of early American social science. According to Ward's cosmic philosophy, the universe consists ultimately of a series of relationships between particles of matter. The evolution of structures from the simplest to the most complex is the product of a struggle between forces unique to each stage. There are three stages: (1) the genesis of matter; (2) the genesis of organic forms, of mind, and finally of man; and (3) the genesis of society. This evolutionary scheme, with all its ramifications, was Ward's primary concern. In spelling out the sequence, Ward introduced the concept of "synergy"—a combination of the ideas of energy and mutuality. Synergy is a process that operates among the antithetical forces of nature and leads to the development of increasingly complex structures. Successive levels of complexity consist of more than the sum of the preceding elements, and this emergence of new levels he called creative synthesis (borrowing the term from Wundt). The process of creative synthesis was Ward's basis not only for ordering the sciences in a manner similar to that of Comte and Spencer but also for his conception of sociology as standing at the summit of all the sciences. Like most of his contemporaries, Ward developed his system of sociology as a handmaiden to his larger purpose, the improvement of mankind. In true positivist fashion, he sought the laws governing the operation of social forces so that the social structures resulting from these forces might be manipulated to produce the "happiness" that he regarded as the goal of all human endeavor. Sociology can serve this end because it is "a true science, answering to the definition of a science, viz., a field of phenomena produced by true natural forces and conforming to uniform laws" (1903, p. 99). Ward distinguished between "pure sociology" and "applied sociology," attributing to each a different role in the process of reform and the creation of happiness. Pure sociology is diagnostic in function, is concerned with what men do—with "human achievement"—and is oriented to the study of social functions. In contrast, applied sociology is therapeutic in function, is concerned with "human improvement"—focusing on the future rather than on the past and present—and is oriented to demonstrating how the principles discovered by pure sociology may be applied to bringing about human progress. Ward insisted that applied sociology is a science rather than an art; it can lay down only the most general guides to social action, and the
WARD, LESTER F. sociologist himself is neither an active reformer nor a politician. In his account of the nature of human society and the process of social evolution, Ward introduced two concepts that continued to play a role in sociological thought after his death. The first concept was that social forces are essentially psychological in nature; this idea not only became one of the themes of American social psychology but also became an organizing principle for many early sociology textbooks, for example, the texts by Small and Vincent in 1894, by E. A. Ross in 1920, and by Park and Burgess in 1921. The second concept was that of telesis: In contrast to Spencer and Sumner, Ward held that human society is not only the product of a natural genesis but, in accordance with the principle of creative synthesis, manifests a new process, telesis. Whereas all previous aggregative structures had advanced by a process of blind adaptation through natural selection, human society permits a process of adaptation through artificial selection, a process that produces purposive achievement. Both human and animal action are motivated by natural desires, but human action, when guided by intellect, leads "indirectly" to achievement and an accelerated rate of progress. Ward envisioned an ideal stage of development in which government (as the instrument of social telesis), armed with sociological principles, would produce "attractive legislation" to ensure a maximum of happiness for all. In more practical terms, Ward's recipe for human happiness was public support of compulsory education, designed according to scientific principles. His theoretical emphasis on social evolution and his pragmatic interest in large-scale social reform combined to place Ward's specifically sociological contributions more in the realm of social process than of social structure. He did, however, discuss social structure in relation to the development of human society. As he saw it, in the earliest stage of development, a conflict between races and the subjugation of one race by another led to the rise of caste. The social inequalities inherent in a caste system were then mitigated by the rise of law and the substitution of legal rights for military force. Thus there developed a form of society he called the state, which was characterized by a class structure in which all strata had legal rights and duties. Constant contact, conflict, and intermixture then led to the creation of a homogeneous people, and as a final stage, with the rise of patriotic sentiment, the formation of a nation took place. Ward was interested in analyzing class structure only in its relationship to the ills of human society
475
and to the prospects for ameliorating these ills. He appreciated the functional significance of property as well as the potential for exploitation in the class systems of historic Western societies (including his own). The most important division in society, he believed, is that between producers and nonproducers; and he documented the sharp contrast between the worlds and the functions of the rulers and the ruled. However, he considered these structural developments as mere human artifacts: Class differences result simply from differences in opportunity, especially educational opportunity, which lead to equally artificial social and cultural monopolies and injustices. Therefore, the way to social amelioration is to make public education compulsory and thus to diffuse knowledge and equalize opportunity. This fundamental reform should be carried out by the government, which Ward regarded as the basis of liberty and the mediator of class antagonisms. (Although Ward approved of the trade union movement and of leftwing parties aiming at a redistribution of wealth, he regarded state socialism as a poor substitute for his scientific sociocracy.) Ward's views were democratic: He assumed that all men have fundamentally equal capacities; he insisted on the necessity of equal educational opportunities; and he had a rationalist faith in the ability of enlightened government to bring about social telesis. There were also radical elements in his thinking: He attacked the dominant laissezfaire tradition, and he developed a gynecocentric theory of the primacy of the female, which gave support to the movement for the emancipation of women. Although Ward did most of his work outside the university, his writings brought him into close contact with scholars in both the natural and social sciences. He was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and he was deeply involved in the affairs of local and national professional societies of philosophers, economists, and geologists. His status as one of the leading American sociologists of his day is indicated by his election in 1906 as the first president of the newly founded American Sociological Society. As the last of the great system-builders, Ward stood at the end of one line in the development of sociology—the conception of sociology as "queen of the social sciences." Ward had an essentially eighteenth-century conception of scientific research. For him, science consisted primarily of logical reasoning from more or less obvious facts, of simple observation, classification, and general-
476
WASHBURN, MARGARET FLOY
ization. (His training as a botanist and geologist may have reinforced this position.) He had no interest in quantification, which helps to explain why subsequent American sociologists rejected his theoretical and methodological approach in favor of more limited research informed by quantitative methods. Ward, indeed, proved a better prophet than intellectual leader: The emergence of the modern welfare state and the involvement of professional sociologists in the practical problems of politics, poverty, and race represent a kind of vindication of his work. HAROLD W. PFAUTZ [For the historical context of Ward's work, see SOCIAL DARWINISM; and the biographies of COMTE; GUMPLOWICZ; SPENCER; for discussion of the subsequent development of Ward's ideas, see EVOLUTION, article On CULTURAL EVOLUTION; SOCIAL PROBLEMS.] WORKS BY WARD
(1883) 1926 Dynamic Sociology: Or Applied Social Science, as Based Upon Statical Sociology and the Less Complex Sciences. 2d ed. 2 vols. New York: Appleton. (1893) 1906 The Psychic Factors of Civilization. 2d ed. Boston: Ginn. 1898 The Outlines of Sociology. New York: Macmillan. (1903) 1925 Pure Sociology: A Treatise on the Origin and Spontaneous Development of Society. 2d ed. New York and London: Macmillan. (1905) 1927 WARD, LESTER F.; and DEALEY, JAMES Q. A Textbook of Sociology. New York: Macmillan. 1906 Applied Sociology: A Treatise on the Conscious Improvement of Society by Society. Boston: Ginn. Glimpses of the Cosmos: A Mental Autobiography. 6 vols. New York: Putnam, 1913-1918. The Ward-Ross Correspondence: 1891-1912. Edited by Bernhard J. Stern. American Sociological Review [1938-1949] 3:362-401; 11:593-605, 734-748; 12: 703-720; 13:82-94; 14:88-119. Young Ward's Diary. Edited by Bernhard J. Stern. New York: Putnam, 1935. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
CAPE, EMILY P. 1922 Lester F. Ward: A Personal Sketch. New York: Putnam. CHUGERMAN, SAMUEL 1939 Lester F. Ward, the American Aristotle: A Summary and Interpretation of His Sociology. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press. DEALEY, JAMES Q. (1927) 1965 Lester Frank Ward. Pages 61-96 in Howard W. Odum (editor), American Masters of Social Science: An Approach to the Study of the Social Sciences Through a Neglected Field of Biography. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat. GERVER, ISRAEL 1963 Lester Frank Ward. New York: Crowell.
WASHBURN, MARGARET FLOY Margaret Floy Washburn (1871-1939) was one of the few women in America to receive her PH.D. in psychology before the turn of the century and to achieve distinction in this field soon after. She
belongs to the second generation of American psychologists, those trained under Americans who had themselves studied in Germany, many at Leipzig under Wilhelm Wundt, the reputed founder of the new experimental psychology. Washburn studied in the 1890s at Cornell University under the Wundtian introspectionist E. B. Titchener and attained her independent competence before J. B. Watson founded the American movement of behaviorism in 1913. She presented a consistently dualistic psychophysiological conception of the animal mind as inferred from the animal's behavior, a view not unlike that of the English psychologist C. Lloyd Morgan (1894). It was much later that the American positivistic behaviorists began to think of behavior as identical with the mind instead of merely furnishing the ground from which the nature of the mind can be inferred. Washburn is best known for her surveys of the literature of animal psychology that appeared in successive editions of her book The Animal Mind (1908; the fourth edition appeared in 1936). For over a quarter of a century this repeatedly updated volume remained the standard text in comparative psychology, a secondary source consulted both by students and by scholars. Washburn's other important contributions to psychology were her Minor Studies, 68 in all, conducted at the psychological laboratory of Vassar College and published over the years from 1905 to 1938. Washburn designed each study, made the interpretation, and wrote the report, but the experiment was conducted by a student under her supervision, and the paper was published under their joint names. This well-known series reveals Washburn as a general psychologist, in the days when it was still possible for a psychologist to work on a broad range of topics in normal psychology— human or animal. Washburn's bibliography lists 61 other articles on a wide variety of topics, both factual and theoretical. One book, Movement and Mental Imagery: Outlines of a Motor Theory of the Complexer Mental Processes (1916), represents her attempt to resolve the difference between introspectionism and behaviorism, the two horns of what was then the American psychological dilemma. Margaret Washburn was born on July 25, 1871, in New York City. She was an only child, and the friends of her youth were books; by the time she went to school she was already an omnivorous reader. When she was ten, her parents settled in Kingston, New York. She attended Vassar College, from which she obtained her A.B. in 1891. Facing the choice of a career, Washburn was
WATER RESOURCES torn between her love of philosophy and of science; as a compromise she chose psychology, as so many important psychologists facing the same conflict had done before her. She went first to Columbia to work under J. McKeen Cattell, although it took the Columbia trustees some months to be persuaded to allow a woman to listen to the lectures. Cattell sent her to Cornell, where women were more welcome, and her arrival there coincided with that of Titchener, who had recently obtained his PH.D. under Wundt in Leipzig. She received her PH.D. in 1894, the first awarded under Titchener. In those days it was not easy for a woman to obtain an academic position. Washburn spent the next six years as professor of psychology, philosophy, and ethics at Wells College, then two years as warden of Sage College, Cornell's women's dormitory, and as lecturer on social psychology at Cornell, then a year as lecturer on psychology at the University of Cincinnati. In 1903 she was called to Vassar College, where for five years she was associate professor of philosophy in charge of psychology, and from 1908 on, professor of psychology. Her active career continued for almost three decades, until on March 18, 1937, she suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, dying in Poughkeepsie, New York, on October 29, 1939. Washburn received many honors. She was president of the American Psychological Association in 1921 and vice-president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1927. Also in 1927 she received an honorary D.SC. from Wittenberg College and a volume of papers on psychology was published in her honor by the American Journal of Psychology, of which she was an editor from 1921 to 1939. She was elected to the select Society of Experimental Psychologists in 1929, immediately after the death of Titchener, who had opposed the admission of women. In 1931 she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the second woman to become a member of that distinguished body. EDWIN G. BORING [For the historical context of Washburn's work, see the biographies of CATTELL; TITCHENER; WUNDT.] WORKS BY WASHBURN
The Minor Studies From the Psychological Laboratory of Vassar College, described in the text, were published in the American Journal of Psychology between 1905 and 1938. (1908) 1936 The Animal Mind: A Text-book of Comparative Psychology. 4th ed. New York: Macmillan. 1916 Movement and Mental Imagery: Outlines of a Motor Theory of the Complexer Mental Processes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
1932
477
Some Recollections. Volume 2, pages 333-358 in A History of Psychology in Autobiography. Worcester, Mass.: Clark Univ. Press; Oxford Univ. Press. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
DALLENBACH, KARL M. 1940 Margaret Floy Washburn: 1871-1939. American Journal of Psychology 53:1-5. KAMBOUROPOULOU, POLYXENIE 1940 A Bibliography of the Writings of Margaret Floy Washburn: 1928-1939. American Journal of Psychology 53:19-20. MARTIN, MABEL F. 1940 The Psychological Contributions of Margaret Floy Washburn. American Journal of Psychology 53:7-18. MORGAN, C. LLOYD (1894) 1906 An Introduction to Comparative Psychology. 2d ed. New York: Scribner; London: Scott. MULL, HELEN K. 1927 A Bibliography of the Writings of Margaret Floy Washburn: 1894-1927. American Journal of Psychology 39:428-436. PILLSBURY, WASHBURN B. 1940 Margaret Floy Washburn (1871-1939). Psychological Review 47:99-109. Washburn, Margaret Floy. 1932 Volume 3, pages 523526 in Psychological Register. Worcester, Mass.: Clark Univ. Press; Oxford Univ. Press. -> Contains a bibliography up to 1932. WOODWORTH, ROBERT S. 1948 Margaret Floy Washburn 1871-1939. Volume 25, pages 275-295 in National Academy of Sciences, Biographical Memoirs. Washington: Government Printing Office.
WATER RESOURCES Demand and supply conditions are more complex for water than for most goods, partly because of the variety of ways in which water is useful. Residential and recreational demands for water are for such diverse uses as drinking, washing, filling swimming pools, carrying away waste, fishing, water skiing, and viewing. Comparing values in these uses is exceedingly difficult. For most industrial processes water is a minor consideration. However, for steam generation of power, oil refining, foundries, and other coolant uses, there is demand to take in water of relatively low temperature and return it at a higher temperature. In a few processes, such as paper and textile production, there is demand to take in a large quantity of water of high quality and return it in low-quality condition, in that it then contains inorganic compounds. This is also true of irrigation, which has more effect on quantity of river flows than any other demand category, both in the United States and in the world as a whole. Irrigation affects quality because of the leaching of salts from the soil through which the water seeps during its return flow. Hydroelectric generation requires a special quantity condition (an amount at a place of fall), but it makes fewer demands on quality. Water is essential to earthly life. At times water may be so plentiful that it is free. (At other times
478
WATER RESOURCES
there may be such an oversupply that its value is negative, as in a flood.) Or the water may be nearly free, in the sense of being plentiful at a natural source but requiring effort to bring it through a spigot. Or it may be so scarce at the source that, at a zero price, more would be demanded than is available. In addition to scarcity of quantity, scarcity of desired quality characteristics is common. Because water taken in may be discharged in a changed quality condition, one use of water can affect the quality of the water supply available to other users. A continued decline can be expected in the fraction of demand for water met from free sources. The growth of population, the growth in per capita demand for water, and the increasing concentration of population in urban centers imply gradually rising supply prices for water of a given quality at the place of demand. Development of a water facility serving many users is frequently less costly than for each user to attempt to satisfy his own needs individually. For instance, while individual wells and septic tanks are still used for residences in the open country, one reservoir and one sewage treatment plant will serve many thousands in a dense area. The frequently extreme economies of scale in constructing water facilities lead to water's being supplied under local monopoly conditions, as in the cases of municipal water and outputs from a large dam. The economies of scale lead sometimes to the fulfilling of various demands for water under conditions of joint supply, for example, by a multipurpose dam, which supplies water for irrigation, power, recreation, and flood control. Markets provide only one of the institutional means through which the uses of water supplies are determined and through which investments affecting supplies are made. Laws and administrative mechanisms also regulate water use; and in addition to private companies, governments at all levels make investments to obtain water and alter its quality. Demand for water Irrigation. In some cases, water can be analyzed in the traditional manner for a purchased input. For example, if the water withdrawn from a river for irrigation is of naturally good quality and if there is no downstream use affected by return flows, attention can be centered on the backwardsloping schedule showing how a change in the price paid for water would affect the amount of water a farmer chooses to take. At a sufficiently low price, a maximum amount would be chosen.
If the charge is gradually raised above this point, the number of acre-feet of water demanded will decrease because a farmer will find it increasingly in his interest to bear the costs associated with using less water at higher charges per acre-foot. Possibilities for economizing on water include reducing ditch losses, varying the number of crops per year from a given field, shifting toward less water-intensive crops, and varying the proportion of his land which he irrigates. If the charge for water should become sufficiently high, no water would be used—landowners would resort to nonirrigated farming or would not farm at all on that particular land. The schedule that has been described depicts a situation in which all the water chosen can be obtained at a given price. One could use the farmer-demand schedules to set a charge per acrefoot at which all demands added up to the total quantity diverted. In practice, predetermined quantities may be delivered to farms on an irrigation project. Yet, estimating the demand schedule can be helpful in indicating how value obtained from using the water depends on amounts delivered. The schedule could be used to make direct allotments of water to farmers, and thus achieve the same allocation as if purchases at a charge per acre-foot were allowed. There is a presumption that allotting water on this basis helps to obtain a maximum value from use of the water because the value to each farmer of having an extra acre-foot is then near the price per acre-foot and so tends to be the same for all farmers. Under these conditions, few if any reallocations of water from lower-value to higher-value uses might be possible. The demand schedule for irrigation water is seldom estimated explicitly. Through judgment and informal comparing of possible levels of water application, a fair approximation to allocation for maximum value may nonetheless be achieved within many irrigation projects. In the allocation of water among different irrigation projects within a river system and among irrigation and other uses, failure to consider the demand schedule for water probably results in greater shortfalls from maximum value. Transfers between withdrawal sites are impeded by laws against selling water rights, by legally established use priorities, and by interstate compacts. As a result, the value of an extra acre-foot may be grossly different among uses, even though the water could be easily transferred by changing the point of withdrawal. In the eastern United States, the riparian doctrine, attaching use of water to adjacent lands, tends to restrict water usage that would affect
WATER RESOURCES persons downstream. The effect on value obtained from water use is not, however, as great as one might at first suppose, since water is not generally scarce in quantity terms in the East. In the western United States the appropriative doctrine gives right to use of the water on land where it was first used, even though this may preclude downstream use. If the first use were always the most valuable use, this system would give allocation for maximum value, but current demands can become appreciably different from historical demands. Some of the grosser geographical and temporal disparities between the values of extra water have been eliminated by the construction of interbasin canals and facilities to even out supplies through storing above and below ground. The costs may have exceeded the addition to value made possible by these investments; however, one use of supplies made available has been to meet higher-value demands. The fact that there are large differences in the prices people would be willing to pay for additional water does not necessarily mean that additions to total value would be great if water were reallocated. For demands that are price inelastic, only limited quantities need to be reallocated to equalize marginal values, with a correspondingly limited increase in total value obtained from using water. Some of the greatest losses connected with legal procedures may be due to delay. Streamlining court procedures could avoid the years now required to settle a case when water use is disputed. Making water rights salable. How great the gains would be from following the frequently made suggestion that water rights be made salable is unknown. Some costs of new investments in water supplies might be avoided because growing demands could be partially met by buying out old uses instead of building new facilities. Yet, harmful effects on third parties (persons not directly involved in a water transaction but affected by it) may be particularly great in such cases. One challenging problem in making water rights salable is the avoidance of deleterious consequences for goals other than maximum value from water use, including prevention of the rapid decline of whole communities. Further problems are involved in devising procedures for complex situations. Because water flows, persons affected by transfers of water rights are often farther removed than those affected by ordinary property right transfers. If water rights are sold, it becomes necessary to devise means of reflecting the interests of these affected persons— interests similar to those protected by zoning in the case of ordinary property rights. Variation in
479
quantity and quality of flows makes the rights transferred more difficult to specify than when selling a piece of land. Interrelations between users give rise to situations in which the operation of market incentives does not result in obtaining maximum value from use of water. In pump irrigation, for instance, where a number of individual farmers are utilizing a common underground supply, it is likely to be drawn down more quickly than is consistent with obtaining maximum value. [See CONSERVATION, article on ECONOMIC ASPECTS, for a discussion of the common-pool problem.] Flood control. The demand schedule for flood protection shows the benefits achieved when various quantities of water are withheld. Each point on the schedule indicates the income that would be derived with that amount of flood protection minus the income that would have been derived if the last increment of flood protection were not provided. Planners contemplating the benefits of various sizes for a particular flood protection dam are roughly approximating this schedule. Greater attention to alternative sizes in the planning process could lead to designs that more nearly maximize the excess of benefits from flood protection over its costs. It is difficult to sell increments of flood protection to those who benefit, since flood protection to one piece of property is likely to imply flood protection to many others. It is even unusual for a number of persons who would be affected by the same flooding to join together as a group to provide themselves with protection, although in many cases the group gains would exceed the costs. In the United States the federal government pays the cost of flood control. This creates a local incentive to press for flood control measures, since a flood control project represents an income transfer into the community. The incentive exists as long as there are any flood control benefits. A community might gain more if given a lump sum equal to the cost of constructing the dam, but this is not a choice available legislatively. A much discussed alternative to building dams is zoning to restrict use of flood plains (see White et al. 1958). One might suppose that zoning would be inefficient because people would then be forced to find higher-cost locations; that is, one might suppose that unencumbered free choice would lead to the optimum location of activity, with people taking account of the risks of flooding. It has been contended, however, that adequate account is not taken of this particular risk. Underdiscounting is certainly encouraged if people expect that flood
480
WATER RESOURCES
protection will be provided. Zoning might lead to a net gain by helping to avoid the costs of overprotecting against floods. Residential intake. In some towns water charges to residential users do not vary with the amount of water taken, and people give little thought to how much they use. Hirshleifer, DeHaven, and Milliman (1960) have reviewed evidence showing that among cities per capita water use tends to vary inversely with the amount charged per gallon of water. At charges severalfold higher than ordinarily observed, water intake would begin to be reduced toward necessity levels and would become highly inelastic. For a particular location, the amount demanded would finally be reduced to zero as people chose other places of residence. But because this would occur only at high prices for water, charges for water have a negligible influence on where most people live. Demand schedules can be conceived for quality characteristics of water in residential use. The demand is undoubtedly inelastic with respect to characteristics affecting health, but there would be considerable response to charges connected with quality characteristics affecting only taste. Quality characteristics must almost necessarily be the same for all users served by a facility, and the characteristics are therefore not sold individually to each user. A nonprice method of determining quality prevails; reliance is on administrative standards. These standards have been described by the National Research Council Committee on Water: The components of standards include technical analyses of requirements, estimation of social norms and acceptability, codification of previously acceptable practice, and professional regard for "better" practice. In the case of municipal water supply, for example, standards are set partly on grounds of health protection (scientific analysis of tolerance of human beings for coliform count and of effectiveness of treatment in reducing organic content), partly on estimation of the acceptability of given levels of color and taste, partly on confidence in traditional treatment (filtration and chlorination), and partly out of a desire to continuously upgrade the product. (1966, p. 38)
But standards may be set, in part at least, with a view to costs of different levels of quality, indicating some response of standards to market demand. Disposal. In some cases the demand for water involves the economics of a waste product. This is exemplified by a town's discharge of sewage into a river. Through biological action and dilution, the water will begin to purify as it moves downstream. But users in the stretch where purification is incomplete will be adversely affected. To the
town discharging the sewage, the water pollution may be costless, but it is not costless if one takes account of users downstream who must treat water taken in or turn to alternative sources. One might, therefore, consider instituting a gradually rising charge to the town per unit of effluents discharged. The schedule of the amount of pollutants emitted as the charge is varied is the demand to use water as a medium of waste disposal. Kneese (1964) has examined the feasibility of such a system of charges, which would give users incentives to take account of the effects of their pollutants on downstream users. A user would then have to find that quantity on his demand schedule for emitting pollutants where the price he is prepared to pay just equals the cost that an extra unit of pollutant imposes on others. The optimum degree of pollution—that which maximizes the value of the water resources to man—can at best be approximated. Lack of measuring devices to identify pollution impedes decisions affecting water quality. Knowledge about biological and chemical reactions is imperfect. Insofar as sewage and industrial pollution have been controlled, direct regulation has been the method most often used. There are barriers to altering standard-of-purity requirements, particularly in response to changing conditions. Waste disposal has generally been added gradually as activities have developed along rivers. Early polluters tend to establish "squatter's rights" to their actions. Even when given the authority, regulating agencies have hesitated to require drastic changes in practices of polluters of long standing. Group effort to control pollution may be less costly than individual efforts: a plant can treat several pollution sources; certain rivers can be maintained at high quality while others nearby are used as open sewers (a purpose of some multipurpose dams is to provide water in periods of low flow, to keep quality at acceptable levels ). There is as yet no generally prevalent means for organizing to undertake group measures affecting water quality. Values difficult to quantify. If a project affects the production of goods and services which are sold, then benefits can be estimated as the increase in real market value of national income resulting from the project. This is the approach implied for most of the water uses discussed above. Market valuations can sometimes be used even when the outputs made possible by the water are difficult to value—by estimating benefits as the saving in costs over the cheapest alternative way of providing the outputs. This method has been
WATER RESOURCES used to estimate benefits from pollution abatement, municipal water supply, and navigation. A proviso, sometimes violated, is that the alternative way of providing the outputs should be justifiable. One should not falsely claim large benefits by assuming an alternative way which is more expensive than the benefit that would be obtained. If something must be purchased in order to enjoy a recreation or aesthetic benefit, such as the land around a reservoir which gives access to use and sight of the water, the increase in sale value due to the water gives a clue to the magnitude of benefit. Because there are generally areas of public access to beaches and lakes, most water resource projects have some benefits whose enjoyment is not associated with anything salable. An approach to estimating public access benefits is to observe the efforts that people make to obtain the benefits. If a certain proportion of a distant population bears the expense of travel and time to visit a park, then it may be conjectured that, ceteris paribus, there is a saving in travel and time cost for a like proportion living nearby, who would be willing to travel far but do not have to. The Hotelling-Clawson approach to estimation of park recreation benefits is based on this idea (see Clawson 1959). But with regard to some of the most important benefits, it is difficult to think of any behavior permitting inferences about value. Thousands of commuters and tourists per day cross a river full of black water with detergent foam on it, and each person is revolted for a minute or two by the sight and the sickly smell. Irreplaceable assets are particularly difficult to evaluate. A dam may flood a famous, unique wild area or a sacred site that is the mecca for a Southwest Indian tribe. Even if objective ways can be found to measure the value beneficiaries put on outputs, there remains the question of whether to accept people's tastes. For instance, it may be desirable to encourage people to engage in outdoor recreation as a way of improving the quality of their lives— regardless of whether they originally feel this need. Lacking objective guides to valuation, the public tends to split into two groups, one feeling that benefits which lack good market indicators have near zero value and the other feeling that they are almost infinitely valuable. To provide better guides remains a challenge to social science research. General formulation. The present discussion has hinted at the variety of demands for water. More comprehensively, the demand for water is concerned with four magnitudes: quantity taken, quantity returned, quality taken, quality returned. Each user takes a quantity of water of some qual-
4 81
ity and may return a different quantity of changed quality. The ratio of quantity taken to quantity returned can sometimes be considered as fixed, but not always, so there may be significant variation in all four magnitudes. There may be costs associated with all the magnitudes. The demand for water is a set of simultaneous relations indicating how the magnitudes vary with each cost. These relations are
LTl = fr/p),
where T is the quantity of water taken in, D is the quantity discharged, and the L's refer to qualitycharacteristic magnitudes taken in and discharged, e.g., pounds of compound or heat content—all magnitudes measured in rates per unit time. The demand for each quantity and quality magnitude can depend on all other costs and revenues. The vector p stands for (PT,PD,PTl, •-, P T l f , P D l , • - ,PDN, # ! , • • • , # ! / ) , where the P's are the incremental values associated with the water quantity and quality magnitudes and the R's are the prices of nonwater inputs and outputs. Because of variation over time, especially seasonal variation, and because water may return from a use, with a lag, to a significantly different location from that at which it was taken in, place and time subscripts not shown here may be needed in some cases. The above discussion of the difficulty of quantifying values concerned the estimation of the P's in the absence of good market indicators. Most of the examples discussed earlier were simplified by assuming that every P except one in a particular situation was zero. As rivers become more crowded, this becomes less and less likely. Demands are more elastic with respect to the P's in the long run than in the short run, especially for industries whose location decisions are influenced by water availability. Development of new technologies in response to scarcity of water quantity and quality characteristics makes long-run demand more elastic. An example is the development of devices for extensive recycling of coolant water where river temperatures have become a problem. Much other engineering research on water treatment is
482
WATER RESOURCES
affecting the demand for water by reducing costs, partly in response to incentives to economize with respect to particular quality characteristics. Decisions affecting water supplies Traditional benefit-cost analysis. Estimates of benefits and costs are made to help in deciding whether to undertake many particular federal water projects. Guidelines for agencies making the estimates have been prepared by a group of government economists known as the Subcommittee on Evaluation Standards (see U.S. Inter-agency Committee . . . 1950). Benefit-cost analysis seeks to estimate, on the basis of investment theory and welfare economics, the contribution of projects to real national income. It has been intensively studied by Eckstein (1958), Krutilla and Eckstein (1958), and others. [See related discussions in INVESTMENT, article on THE INVESTMENT DECISION; ECONOMICS OF DEFENSE.] The remainder of the present article will emphasize the unsettled questions important for water resource development. Further valuation difficulties. Irreversibilities in decisions about water abound, and systematic procedures for making such decisions are needed. Ciriacy-Wantrup (1952) points out that resources may be used to the point where replenishing them becomes very expensive. An example is drawing down ground water levels until sea water intrudes. Uncertainty considerations are paramount, since unforeseeable future demand for resources may ex post facto make it desirable to have conserved the resource, even if this is not indicated by a present value calculation based only on expected demands. Therefore, even if agreement were to be reached on the appropriate discount rate, the problem would remain of making choices affecting benefits in different time periods. [See CONSERVATION, article on ECONOMIC ASPECTS.] Another problem of irreversibility is the phasing of related projects. Here again, uncertainty must be considered, and therefore the need for maintaining flexibility. As a third type of irreversibility, consider the decision whether to reserve land for recreation around a reservoir. Costs are likely to be lower, in relation to the benefits, if the land is reserved before other urban uses come in. As congestion increases, recreation demands rise; but costs may rise more rapidly, due to the increasing acquisition price of the land, reflecting the value of alternative uses at the time of acquisition. The present value of net benefits for alternative starting years declines and in time may become negative as the starting year becomes more distant. Thus, the
gains possible from early initiation of the project are lost forever as time passes. A standard assumption is that costs reflect the alternative values that would be obtained in the absence of a project. Yet, if a project results in more productive employment, the wage rate overstates costs to society. Suppose a flood control project results in employment of geographically immobile workers who would otherwise be unemployed. As a result of increased production of tomatoes, say, on the protected land, workers in other regions who would be satisfying this demand in the absence of the project will be forced out of tomato production. But if the displaced workers are mobile and have skills suited to growing industries elsewhere, they will probably find alternative employment. In this case the project has a net employment-creating effect. Identifying these chains of events and estimating their importance is a challenge. Another problem concerns the effect of a water resource project on local government services. In declining regions, past outmigration of productive persons has left concentrations of children and older persons, coupled with a relatively low local tax base. As a result, government services, particularly education, tend to be inferior. From the national point of view, more optimum expenditures on the services would be a benefit, as indicated by the high rates of return that have been found for investments in education. Thus, there is a need to quantify the indirect effects a project may have through changing local tax bases. The importance of such geographical impacts is recognized in calculations of "secondary" benefits of increased income to local areas. But these calculations fail to indicate where activities in the rest of the economy are displaced. Moreover, guides are lacking as to what is a desirable distribution of economic activity spatially. Further analyses could yield regional development objectives, that recognize interrelations of regions, as part of a more consistent approach to the income-distributional effects of projects. Policy. Income-distribution goals, broadly interpreted, greatly complicate the task of choosing projects. An example of how they have entered planning is the cost allocation procedures used as a basis for levying repayment charges. The separable-costs-remaining-benefits method, which has been accepted in principle by government agencies, allocates proportionally to the gains received by beneficiaries costs not associable with any purposes. Yet, the method is seldom followed in a straightforward manner. For instance, interest is
WATER RESOURCES waived on costs of irrigation on federal projects, which amounts to a subsidy of about half the cost. Similarly, pricing of project outputs often reflects income-distributional objectives rather than attempting to give incentives to achieve maximum value from use of the water. Besides favorable influence on the size distribution of income, distributional desiderata include protecting against sudden economic loss, protecting identity of cultural and social groups, providing equality of opportunities for children without extreme interference with the tastes of parents, to name only a few. Some persons feel that distributional goals should be overriding, while, at the other extreme, some persons still view distributional considerations as undesired interferences with the water value goal, resulting from an imperfect political process. There is surprisingly little serious discussion about the goals of policies (other than the water value goal), the weights to be assigned to the goals, or the alternative means of reaching the goals. This results in inability to distinguish between policy pressures that accurately reflect social welfare and those that run counter to it. Even though we are hindered by lack of understanding of goals, it would be useful to attempt to develop criteria for evaluating the variety of institutional variables that influence water use, including those related to water contracts, water districts, laws, and governmental organization. Explanations of policy formation are needed to predict the effectiveness of possible reforms. These include analytical studies of how water laws and other institutions have responded previously to changing conditions. It would also be helpful to have theoretical models of legislative behavior predicting outcomes of water decisions on the basis of constituency interests, party positions, coalition formation, and the views of particular influential men. Ideologies and abstract ideas (the conservation movement, the appeal of dams as monuments) affect voting, particularly that of groups with a minor economic stake. External pressures on legislatures and agencies are related to the value of water in alternative uses. If pressures from primary beneficiaries and secondary beneficiaries are proportional, the secondary beneficiaries do not change the pressure pattern. Pressures from those who might suffer sharp losses reflect distributional considerations that seem desirable. Pressures for secondary capital gains, e.g., a rise in local retail land values, are often strong and in the direction of a more unequal income distribution.
483
Analysis of pressures could yield quantitative estimates of gains and losses from legislative behavior under alternative arrangements. Estimates are needed of the true alternative (opportunity) costs of water projects, namely, the other activities legislatures would authorize if water project budgets were lower. G. S. TOLLEY
[See also CONSERVATION; COST.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKERMAN, EDWARD A.; and LOF, GEORGE 1959 Technology in American Water Development. Published for Resources for the Future. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. BREWER, MICHAEL 1962 Public Pricing of Natural Resources. Journal of Farm Economics 44:35-49. CIRIACY-WANTRUP, SIEGFRIED VON (1952) 1963 Resource Conservation: Economics and Policies. Rev. ed. Berkeley: Univ. of California, Division of Agricultural Sciences, Agricultural Experimental Station. CIRIACY-WANTRUP, SIEGFRIED VON 1956 Concepts Used as Economic Criteria for a System of Water Rights. Land Economics 32:295-312. CLAWSON, MARION 1959 Methods of Measuring the Demand for and Value of Outdoor Recreation. Washington: Resources for the Future. ECKSTEIN, OTTO 1958 Water-resource Development: The Economics of Project Evaluation. Harvard Economic Studies, Vol. 104. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. HlRSHLEIFER, JACK; DEHAVEN, JAMES C.; and MlLLIMAN,
JEROME W. 1960 Water Supply: Economics, Technology and Policy. Univ. of Chicago Press. KNEESE, ALLEN V. 1964 The Economics of Regional Water Quality Management. Published for Resources for the Future. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. KRUTILLA, JOHN V.; and ECKSTEIN, OTTO 1958 Multiple Purpose River Development. Published for Resources for the Future. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. MAASS, ARTHUR et al. 1962 Design of Water-resource Systems: New Techniques for Relating Economic Objectives, Engineering Analysis, and Governmental Planning. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL, COMMITTEE ON WATER 1966 Alternatives in Water Management: A Report. Publication 1408. Washington: National Academy of Sciences—National Research Council. SMITH, STEPHEN C. 1961 The Rural-Urban Transfer of Water in California. Natural Resources Journal 1: 64-75. SYMPOSIUM ON THE ECONOMICS OF WATERSHED PLANNING, KNOXVILLE, 1959 1961 Economics of Watershed Planning. Edited by G. S. Tolley and Fletcher E. Riggs. Ames: Iowa State Univ. Press. U.S. CONGRESS, SENATE, SELECT COMMITTEE ON NATIONAL WATER RESOURCES 1961 Report. 87th Congress, 1st Session, Senate Report No. 29. Washington: Government Printing Office. U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY 1960 A Primer on Water, by Luna B. Leopold and Walter B. Langebein. Washington: Government Printing Office. U.S. INTER-AGENCY COMMITTEE ON WATER RESOURCES (1950) 1959 Proposed Practices for Economic Analy-
484
WATSON, JOHN B.
sis of River Basin Projects: Report. Subcommittee on Evaluation Standards. Rev. ed. Washington: Government Printing Office. WHITE, GILBERT F. et al. 1958 Changes in Urban Occupance of Flood Plains in the United States. University of Chicago, Department of Geography, Research Paper No. 57. The Department.
WATSON, JOHN B. John Broadus Watson (1878-1958), American psychologist and founder of behaviorism, was born near Greenville, South Carolina. He attended Furman University, from which he obtained his master's degree in 1899 and which awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1918. A thirst for graduate work in philosophy took him to the University of Chicago. Although he did continue to study philosophy (and later was to express amusement at the charge that he was ignorant of that subject), the influence of J. R. Angell, a leading functional psychologist, soon made psychology his primary interest. Watson found his metier in the laboratory study of animal behavior, a recent innovation in American psychology pioneered by E. L. Thorndike. Indeed, Watson's major experimental contribution was in the field of animal psychology, although he also initiated notable work in the experimental analysis of infant behavior. His concern with comparative studies was significant for the development of his behavioristic premise: the absence of speech in animals compels the experimenter to communicate with his subjects—and to arrange that they may communicate with him—in behavioral terms only. Watson's doctoral dissertation, Animal Education, was published in 1903. Then a continuous stream of publications followed, all on the subject of animal psychology. The flow was not interrupted by his move to Johns Hopkins in 1908, and it culminated in his textbook Behavior: An Introduction to Comparative Psychology (1914). Classic among these researches was his investigation of the sensory determinants of maze learning in the rat (1907), a study in which he successively deprived the subjects of various sensory modalities in order to assess the contribution of each modality to the learning process. In addition, he worked with monkeys and birds. His work on imitation in two rhesus monkeys (1908a) convinced him that they lacked this kind of social response—a conclusion that has not stood the test of time. His work on birds (1908k) took him outside the laboratory, to a small island off the coast of Florida,
where he took part in intensive investigations of the homing mechanisms of terns. Watson's field work was characterized not only by patience—not an unusual trait in naturalists—but also by noteworthy ingenuity in adapting the methods of the laboratory to the difficult task of field observation. Compared with the rewards of research on animals, the general psychology of his day seemed increasingly inadequate to Watson. His impatience with it achieved full expression in his declaration of independence, in a paper entitled "Psychology as a Behaviorist Views It" (1913). This paper, a landmark in the history of experimental psychology, enunciated the doctrine that psychology is the science of behavior, and it presented a methodological approach that Watson regarded as a prerequisite for the advancement of psychology. Mentalistic concepts, images, the study of consciousness and its contents, and introspection as the principal method must all be abolished, to be replaced by objective observation of the organism's response to controlled stimuli. Indeed, human behavior was to be studied in the same careful way that animal behavior is studied in the laboratory. After America's entry into World War i, Watson spent a year doing military research of various kinds. It was for him an unhappy time, in which he came in contact with inefficiency and arrogance of a kind that disgusted him. Returning to Johns Hopkins, he plunged into research again, this time on infant behavior. Watson was always inclined to involve the members of his immediate family in his work, particularly in his research on infancy and child rearing. His first wife, Mary Ickes Watson, collaborated with him in his study of the visual responses of rats (1913), and she permitted him to test one of their infants, immediately after birth, for its ability to make swimming movements in a tub of water. Mary Watson divorced him in 1920 for adultery with Rosalie Rayner, who was his assistant in research on infant behavior. The next year, Miss Rayner became Watson's second wife. Together they published the famous study of Albert B. (1920), a child whom they conditioned to fear a white rat by producing a loud sound simultaneously with successive presentations of the rat. Some years later Watson published his thoughts on child rearing (Watson & Watson 1928); they were derived from his experimental work on conditioning of fears, but they were also characterized by a no-nonsense, tough-minded approach that led to at least one unhappy childhood, as one of the sons by his second wife testified (J. R. Watson 1950).
WATSON, JOHN B. The sensational divorce compelled Watson to leave the academic world, and he went into the advertising business, with considerable success. His work on infant conditioning was disrupted, and though it was continued later, especially in the notable studies of Mary Cover Jones (1924a; 1924b), Watson's part in it, and indeed his involvement in psychology generally, grew progressively less. In the first decade after his enforced retirement he still lectured on psychology, and he published some of these lectures in a semipopular book, Behaviorism (1925), a book that appears to have attracted many psychologists to the field. While Watson's contributions to the scientific literature grew fewer and fewer, his output of articles for popular magazines increased markedly. The appeal of Watson's popular writings may well have helped create the immense popularity that behaviorism enjoyed with the general public in America in the 1920s and early 1930s. By 1935, when his second wife died, Watson regarded himself as having withdrawn completely from active participation in psychological work (1936). In 1957 the American Psychological Association, whose president he had been in 1915, honored him as one of its surviving ex-presidents: he was awarded a ceremonial gavel with an appropriate citation for having "initiated a revolution in psychological thought." He died almost exactly a year later, aged 80. It is possible only to speculate about the work Watson might have done and the influence he might have had if his academic career had not been terminated so early. Almost certainly, he would have developed new lines of research, and it might have been he who performed Lamarckian experiments on the training of rats, rather than his archcritic, William McDougall. (As early as 1906 Watson had pleaded for an "experimental station for the study of certain problems of animal behavior," one of which, deriving from a suggestion by Thorndike, was the Lamarckian experiment.) Watson's direct influence on psychology through his students would surely have been greater than his indirect, albeit powerful, influence through the general public. So far as the acceptance of behaviorism by professional psychologists is concerned, Watson's enforced retirement from academic psychology may indirectly have retarded it. Free from the constraints and cautious reservations of scientific discourse, Watson stated his case with an almost evangelical fervor that certainly irritated professional psychologists (Watson & McDougall 1928). While some academic psychologists, such as Karl
485
S. Lashley, Walter S. Hunter, and Albert P. Weiss, counted themselves behaviorists, the majority resisted teaching the new doctrine to their students, many of whom had a layman's acquaintance with behaviorism before they came to college. The leap ahead did not come until the next generation of psychologists, which included Clark Hull, Edward C. Tolman, and, somewhat later, B. F. Skinner and Neal Miller. All of them were considerably influenced by Watson, though their contributions to learning theory are at once more elaborate and more sophisticated than his relatively simple, reflex notions. Even more recently, concrete form has been given to developments in education and in psychiatry that Watson adumbrated. For example, he explicitly anticipated the kind of manipulation of environmental contingencies that is fundamental to the Skinnerian approach to programmed learning, which in turn is an application of psychology that bids fair to revolutionize classroom techniques. The development, especially in Britain, of behavior therapy for symptomatic treatment of psychiatric disorders owes much to Watson's work on little Albert and similar cases; the desensitizing techniques he first described are being widely applied. Watson's theory and its components In its final form, Watson's theoretical position had the following components: functionalism, associationism, peripheralism, and extreme environmentalism. Watson was trained at Chicago in the heyday of the functionalist school, and he was clearly impressed with the emphasis of the functionalists on process instead of structure. The functionalists were in revolt against the "new" psychology of Wilhelm Wundt, which was concerned with breaking down the contents of consciousness into "mental" elements, the identification of these rather static elements being comparable to the identification of the elements in a chemical compound by analysis. More than any previous theory, the functionalist position, with its emphasis on the importance of environmental determinants of consciousness and on the antecedents of consciousness in general, was akin to Watson's own ideas on how behavior is modified. Although he rejected certain elements of mentalism that still remained in the functionalist position and insisted that any analysis of animal behavior should consist only of an objective description of the behavior observed, without any attempt to infer what is going on in the animal's mind, he nevertheless adopted the functionalist view of behavior as an ongoing and continuous
486
WATSON, JOHN B.
process. In a sense, then, Watson may be regarded as the last of the functionalists. Watson's associationism was in the classic tradition, which saw the association of stimulus with motor response as the bond upon which habits are built. Watson's psychology was a reflex psychology, based on conditioning as the central process. He did not at first appear to be much impressed with the findings on reinforcement from the laboratories of Pavlov and Bekhterev; his own emphasis was upon the recency principle of learning, by which connections are formed because of the temporal contiguity of the processes involved. Later, however, without explicitly admitting the necessity of the reinforcement principle, he made use of classical Pavlovian conditioning as an explanatory principle. It was, he said, the keystone to the arch of behaviorism (1929), and he used it successfully and correctly in his account of the conditioning of fears in the infant by the association of a previously neutral stimulus with an unconditioned fear stimulus. Watson was a peripheralist in that he sought to deny the importance of central cerebral processes. It was almost as if he believed that the mentalistic mind resides in the brain, and that contamination by the former can be avoided by eschewing the latter. Pleasure, for example, is associated with stimuli originating from the (peripheral) erogenous zones, in particular from the tumescence of genitalia. Thought is to be regarded as subvocal speech: if we think with our vocal apparatus, then its movements, be they ever so small, are the responses by which the information is transmitted. Thought, imageless or otherwise, is then intelligible as a series of muscle movements. The notion of subvocal speech was an important element in Watson's system, since it enabled him not only to suggest a definite physiological construct as the essential mediator in human thought but also to relate this construct to the one function—speech—which differentiates man from the other animals and which has permitted him to initiate, maintain, and extend the enormous cultural apparatus that subserves civilized life. But it was this aspect of Watson's psychology, perhaps more than any other, which made Tolman's derogatory epithet—"muscle twitch psychology"—stick. While Watson's views almost certainly involve oversimplification and subsequent work on the electrophysiology of thought as it relates to subvocal speech has not in general supported him, it can be argued that the current emphasis on the analysis of meaning owes much to Watson's assertion of the importance of implicit responses (Goss 1961).
Watson is noted for the extreme environmentalism of his theoretical position. His most famous statement of his position, however, is probably his most fatuous and illustrates his abandon of academic caution in the post-Hopkins days (although he did apologize for this particular remark) : "Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select —doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors" ([1925] 1962, p. 104). This antihereditarianism is bound up with Watson's antipathy to the doctrine of instincts, as formulated, for example, by McDougall, who postulated more or less fixed action patterns having specific emotional concomitants and responding to specific stimuli. It is in no small measure due to Watson's polemics that American psychology had an antihereditarian cast for a generation or more. But recently a change has occurred: it is now seen to be entirely possible to acknowledge a hereditary component in most behavior without attributing to the behavior instinctive determinants in the mentalistic way which Watson mistrusted. He seems to have been overinfluenced by his work on infant behavior: infants respond with emotion (e.g., fear) to only a few specific stimuli—loss of support, loud noises, and restraint of limbs; all other culturally potent stimuli, such as furry objects, snakes, or the sight of flames, leave the infant indifferent. Watson deduced from this that human infants are innately equipped with only a few patterns of behavior in response to specific stimuli, and that all other responses (in this case, fear responses) develop later and must therefore be regarded as learned. Many of Watson's ideas were not new, and many have not stood the test of time. He was not, certainly, the first to advocate methodological behaviorism: others, notably Max F. Meyer, had initiated a trend toward the objectification of psychology by the abandonment of introspective methods. Pavlov and Bekhterev did work on conditioning long before he did. His functionalist position owed much to the psychologists at Chicago. He stated his peripheralist and antihereditarian positions in too extreme terms. Nevertheless, Watson made an immense contribution to psychology, completing a revolution that others had begun and preparing the way for more sophisticated work. Nowadays there are few psychologists who are not behaviorists,
WEBB, SIDNEY AND BEATRICE though they may not recognize, much less accept, the label. While consciousness is no longer quite the dirty word it was for a long time, overt behavior, studied objectively, is the preferred subject of study. This methodological behaviorism, together with operationism and refined statistical analysis, has provided psychology with a set of tools equal, if not superior, to those of other biological sciences. Except for Freud, Watson may well have been the psychologist best known to the general public of his day. For many people, Watson's assertion of the absence of hereditary traits, and his faith in the acquisition by each individual of a set of habits, mediated by conditioning principles, constituted the image of psychology. The public generally approved of this image and in the United States accorded psychology support and recognition. Therefore, while Watson's direct influence on psychology may have waned over the years, his indirect influence, both within and without psychology, may be with us for many years to come. P. L. BROADHURST [For the historical context of Watson's work, see the biographies of ANGELL; BEKHTEREV; MCDOUGALL; PAVLOV. For discussion of the subsequent development of Watsons ideas, see LEARNING, articles on CLASSICAL CONDITIONING and INSTRUMENTAL LEARNING; and the biographies of HULL; HUNTER; LASHLEY; TOLMAN.]
WORKS BY WATSON 1903
Animal Education: An Experimental Study on the Psychical Development of the White Rat, Correlated With the Growth of Its Nervous System. Contributions to Philosophy, Vol. 4, no. 2. Univ. of Chicago Press. 1906 The Need of an Experimental Station for the Study of Certain Problems in Animal Behavior. Psychological Bulletin 3:149-156. 1907 Kinaesthetic and Organic Sensations: Their Role in the Reactions of the White Rat to the Maze. Psychological Review, Monograph Supplements, Vol. 8, no. 33. Lancaster, Pa., and Baltimore, Md.: Revue. 19080 Imitation in Monkeys. Psychological Bulletin 5: 169-178. 1908b The Behavior of Noddy and Sooty Terns. Carnegie Institution, Publications 103:187-255. 1913 Psychology as a Behaviorist Views It. Psychological Review 20:158-177. 1913 WATSON, JOHN B.; and WATSON, MARY I. A Study of the Responses of Rodents to Monochromatic Light. Journal of Animal Behavior 3:1-14. 1914 Behavior: An Introduction to Comparative Psychology. New York: Holt. (1919) 1929 Psychology From the Standpoint of a Behaviorist. 3d ed., rev. Philadelphia and London: Lippincott. (1920) 1960 WATSON, JOHN B.; and RAYNER, ROSALIE Conditioned Emotional Reactions. Pages 28-37 in
487
H. J. Eysenck (editor), Behaviour Therapy and the Neuroses. Oxford: Pergamon. (1925) 1962 Behaviorism. Rev. ed. Univ. of Chicago Press. 1928 WATSON, JOHN B.; and MCDOUGALL, WILLIAM The Battle of Behaviorism: An Exposition and an Exposure. London: Routledge. 1928 WATSON, JOHN B.; and WATSON, ROSALIE Psychological Care of Infant and Child. London: Allen & Unwin. 1929 Behaviourism. Volume 3, pages 327-329 in Encyclopaedia Britannica. 14th ed. London: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. 1936 John Broadus Watson. Volume 3, pages 271-281 in A History of Psychology in Autobiography. Worcester, Mass.: Clark Univ. Press. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
BERGMANN, GUSTAV 1956 The Contribution of John B. Watson. Psychological Review 63:265-276. BORING, EDWIN G. (1929) 1950 A History of Experimental Psychology. 2d ed. New York: Appleton. Goss, ALBERT E. 1961 Early Behaviorism and Verbal Mediating Responses. American Psychologist 16:285298. John Broadus Watson. 1932 Volume 3, pages 528-530 in Psychological Register. Worcester, Mass.: Clark Univ. Press. JONES, MARY C. (1924a) 1960 The Elimination of Children's Fears. Pages 38-44 in H. J. Eysenck (editor), Behaviour Therapy and the Neuroses. Oxford: Pergamon. JONES, MARY C. (1924&) 1960 A Laboratory Study of Fear: The Case of Peter. Pages 45-51 in H. J. Eysenck (editor), Behaviour Therapy and the Neuroses. Oxford : Pergamon. WATSON, JOHN R. 1950 Letter to the Editors. Life 29, no. 3:8 only.
WEALTH See NATIONAL WEALTH. WEBB, SIDNEY AND BEATRICE Sidney and Beatrice Webb formed one of the most remarkable married partnerships in British history; they deeply influenced the social thought and the social institutions of their country. They were born in very different social environments. Beatrice, the older, was born in January 1858 at Standish House near Gloucester, the eighth daughter of Richard Potter and his wife, Laurencina Heyworth, the daughter of a well-known Liverpool merchant. Richard Potter's grandfather was a selfmade man who started as a small draper in Tadcaster, Lancashire. His sons, "the radical Potters," played a large part in the movements for reform of Parliament, reform of the Poor Law, and repeal of the Corn Laws and in the development of the Manchester Grammar School and the Manchester
488
WEBB, SIDNEY AND BEATRICE
London [see the biography of BOOTH; see also Guardian. Richard Potter himself, after some vicisBooth et al. 1889-1891], To this she contributed situdes, became an important Victorian entrepersonal research into the conditions of labor for preneur. Beatrice, a lonely and delicate child with outworkers in the East End garment trade, and a constant tendency to dyspepsia and insomnia, her research led to her giving evidence in 1888 received practically no formal education but taught before the House of Lords Select Committee on the herself by extensive reading at home and discussion Sweating System. It also led her to the conclusion with her father's visitors, particularly with the that "the whole nation is the sweater." From her philosopher Herbert Spencer, who was a guide and study of the cooperative movement, she had gone friend for much of her early life. After her mother's on to study another form of native-grown organizadeath in 1882 (and the marriage of her seven sisters to men of standing and distinction), Bea- tion of the working class, the trade unions, with whose membership she had also made acquainttrice became her father's companion and part-time ance in Lancashire. She termed the trade unions secretary and mistress of his household, responsithe "democracies of producers," in contrast to the ble for the entertainment of his many distinguished "democracies of consumers" which made up the guests. It was in this connection that she came cooperative movement. She attended the Trades close to being the third wife of Joseph ChamberUnion Congress in 1889—the year of the great lain—a romance terminated, not without pain, by "dockers' tanner" strike. However, the task of her realization of the dominating character of the gathering information about trade unions proved man. immensely more complicated than the job she had Sidney, born in July 1859, came, by contrast, already done for cooperatives, and, casting around from the lower middle class. His father was an for help, she was recommended to a man named accountant who had been one of John Stuart Mill's Sidney Webb "who literally pours out information." committee members in the famous Westminster By that time the name of Sidney Webb was beelection of 1865, and his mother kept a dress shop in Cranbourne Street, Leicester Square. They strugcoming moderately well known in circles interested in social reform. In 1884 he had been introduced gled to give their children an education, and Sidney went to the City of London School and also to by his journalist friend Bernard Shaw to a newly formed body called the Fabian Society and shortly schools in Germany and Switzerland. At 15 he left afterward began his fifty-year tenancy of a seat school and became a clerk in the City, continuing on its executive committee. At once he started to to educate himself by evening classes, principally at Birkbeck College (which was not then part of write and to lecture for it; in 1887 he wrote the the University of London). In 1881, after three most famous of all its pamphlets, Facts for Socialyears in the civil service, he excelled in a qualifying ists; and at the end of the following year he deexamination and eventually selected the Colonial livered one of the lectures (given by the seven Office. members of the executive committee) which were It was not until 1890 that Beatrice and Sidney published in 1889 as Fabian Essays in Socialism. met, and it was concern with the problems of soThe book immediately became a best seller—it was ciety which brought them together. Beatrice, weary reprinted as recently as 1962—and gave immediand critical of the round of London "society" and ate prominence to the infant society. Beatrice had of what she felt to be the fruitless efforts of the read and appreciated Webb's lecture before she Charity Organisation Society and other such bodies met its author; they were married in June of 1892 to relieve and improve the condition of the vast and at once set off to hunt up records of early trade numbers of the poor, had, incognito, visited relaunions in Glasgow and Dublin. Sidney had already tives of her family who had not risen in the world, left the civil service for journalism. Now his wife's income of a thousand pounds a year permitted him the Akeds of Bacup in Lancashire. There she discovered the "respectable" working class and its to devote his time to social research and investigation, propaganda for socialism through the Fabian organizations, particularly the cooperative societies which, as a social phenomenon, excited her imagiSociety, and public and political work. In the same year as his marriage he was elected to the London nation and led eventually to her first published book, The Co-operative Movement (1891). Before County Council (created in 1888) as member for writing the book, however, and shortly after her Deptford and at once became the guide, particularly on educational matters, of the Progressive break with Chamberlain, she had been invited to take part in the immense and important inquiry majority, whose election program was, in fact, which her shipowner cousin, Charles Booth, was largely drawn up by himself. The immediate fruits of the "partnership" were making into the life and labor of the people of
WEBB, SIDNEY AND BEATRICE in the field of research in economic history. Their great classic, The History of Trade Unionism, which Beatrice had begun, was completed and published in 1894. It was followed in 1897 by Industrial Democracy, and the Webbs then turned to the history and problems of English local governing bodies, which they were later to christen "democracies of citizens." This tremendous study, which for many years stood alone in its field, was begun in 1899 and resulted in ten large volumes containing in all over four thousand pages. These were published at intervals between 1906 and 1929, in addition to some half-dozen smaller books on specialized local-government problems. This research and the task of writing it up were a continuous preoccupation, but practical political work proceeded simultaneously. At first, and for some time thereafter, it was Sidney who was chiefly in the public eye, Beatrice being more of a background influence, "permeating" their London friends and professional acquaintances with the Webb ideas and plans. Sidney's results were spectacular. Apart from his work on the London County Council (which included laying the foundation for the system of secondary-school education as well as for technical education in London), during the first ten years of his marriage he was responsible, with his wife's assistance, for the creation of the well-known London School of Economics, for the reorganization (with R. B. Haldane) of the University of London, and for the proposals to reshape state education in England that became, almost without amendment, the fundamental Education Acts of 1902 and 1903. Beatrice became active as a politician only after producing for the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, which sat from 1905 to 1909, the remarkable document known simply as the Minority Report (see The Break-up of the Poor Law 1909), which anticipated most of the social legislation brought finally into effect by the Labour government of 1945. Aided by the radical revival of 1906, the Webbs, with the assistance of the Fabian Society, ran a nationwide campaign for the abolition of the Poor Laws, but when that failed, they gave up hope of influencing the older parties and gradually turned toward the young Labour party. Just before World War i, they had founded the New Statesman and the Fabian Research Department—the latter, under guild socialist influence, eventually broke away from Webbian control, though not from the Webbian tradition of practical fact finding. During the war, the Webbs found themselves at the center of the problems created by war conditions and prospective postwar reconstruction. Both
489
became members of many committees, for one of which Beatrice wrote a minor classic on equal pay (1919). Immediately after the war was over, Sidney was appointed by the miners as one of their representatives on the famous Sankey Commission on the Coal Mines. His most lasting contribution after World War I, however, was as Fabian representative on the Executive Committee of the Labour party, for which, in close consultation with its secretary, Arthur Henderson, he drafted both the new constitution of 1918 and the statement of policy on which it appealed to the country, Labour & the New Social Order. The constitution has endured with scarcely a change, and the basic policy, notwithstanding all that has happened since, has not really altered very greatly. Thereafter the new contributions to thought and action made by the Webbs began to decrease, though they wrote many more books and continued to write and to lecture. Their reputations remained high. Sidney's tenure of office in the two minority Labour governments was undistinguished, and after the ignominious fall of the second one, their interest shifted to the Soviet Union, which they visited in 1932 and found—more or less—a Fabian paradise. Their last large-scale book, Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? (1935), was an enormous encomium that raised few questions; after it was finished, they retired altogether from London life. Beatrice died in 1943 and Sidney (who had earlier suffered a serious stroke) in 1947. They are buried in Westminster Abbey. The social contribution of the Webbs to British life can be read even more clearly in their deeds than in the immense mass of words that they produced. Their social philosophy was basically simple; it rested upon the following convictions: (1) The principle of utilitarianism, "the greatest happiness of the greatest number," is correct. (2) This utilitarian goal, under modern conditions, can be reached by the expropriation of private, profit-making capital and its replacement, in the major part of the economic life of the country, by communalized institutions controlled either by the national state or by local authorities, such as county councils, or by cooperative enterprise. Neither the Webbs nor their Fabian colleagues advocated universal nationalization. (3) Any such enterprises should be conducted democratically but efficiently; by this they originally meant conducted by persons adequately trained for their posts and selected by democratic process, but later, under guild socialist pressure, they were induced to allow some place to representatives of the interests of the participating
490
WEBB, SIDNEY AND BEATRICE
workers, acting either through trade unions or professional organizations. (4) There should be established a "national minimum of civilised life," including, along with incomes, standards of health, housing, and the like, below which no one should be allowed to fall. (5) Equality, or at least an approximation to equality, in the conditions of existence is the proper ultimate goal. These principles seemed so obviously true that when they were explained with sufficient clarity and the results of failure to apply them described in irrefutable detail, no one with a reasonably open mind could fail to be convinced. "Measurement and publicity" was the phrase they coined to describe this process of producing in others convictions akin to their own. As a corollary to their basic outlook and to their belief that the forces of history were working on their side (see Webb 1889), they insisted on "the inevitability of gradualness," a phrase used by Webb in his presidential address to the Labour Party Conference (see The Labour Party on the Threshold 1923a); that is to say, the socialist state would be brought about not by any single and violent convulsion but by stages, by piecemeal legislation and piecemeal changes in administration, so that in the end the country would have become a socialized economy painlessly and almost without being aware of it. For this reason, the propaganda and work of the Fabian Society, which was so long the main vehicle of the Webbs' thoughts on social change, was directed mainly toward the advocacy of specific reforms and the conversion of specific groups of persons, rather than toward an emphasis on the need for root-and-branch revision—though ultimate radical revision was always the underlying aim. The Webbs did not believe in trying to go further than they could foresee at any given moment. It is now clear enough that their analysis assumed an orderly development which has not in fact happened, that it was overly intellectual and overly rational and omitted too many factors. They themselves, after 1931, became more receptive to the idea of catastrophic change, as had occurred in Russia, though they never thought it probable in Great Britain. Although their long-run prognosis was not entirely correct, the influence of their pragmatic socialism, coupled with their immense industry and flair for purposeful and detailed research, has deeply influenced the development of society and social legislation within their own country. MARGARET COLE
[See also ECONOMIC THOUGHT, article on SOCIALIST THOUGHT; SOCIALISM; and the biography of WALLAS.] WORKS BY SIDNEY AND BEATRICE WEBB
(1887) 1938 WEBB, SIDNEY Facts for Socialists, From the Political Economists and Statisticians. 14th ed., rev. Fabian Tract No. 5. London: Fabian Society. (1889) 1962 WEBB, SIDNEY The Basis of Socialism.Historic. Pages 28-57 in Fabian Essays. 6th ed. London: Allen & Unwin. (1891) 1899 WEBB, BEATRICE The Co-operative Movement in Great Britain. London: Sonnenschein; New York: Scribner. (1894) 1950 The History of Trade Unionism. Rev. ed. London and New York: Longmans. (1897) 1920 Industrial Democracy. New ed. 2 vols. in 1. London and New York: Longmans. 1903 The History of Liquor Licensing in England: Principally From 1700-1830. London and New York: Longmans. 1906 The Parish and the County. London and New York: Longmans. -> Volume 1 of the authors' English Local Government. (1908) 1963 The Manor and the Borough. 2 vols. Hamden, Conn.: Shoe String Press. -» Volumes 2 and 3 of the authors' English Local Government. 1909 WEBB, SIDNEY; and WEBB, BEATRICE (editors) The Break-up of the Poor Law. London and New York: Longmans. -» This volume is Part 1 of the Minority Report of the Royal Commission on Poor Laws and Relief of Distress. Part 2 was published under the title The Public Organisation of the Labour Market. (1913) 1963 The Story of the King's Highway. London: Cass. -» Volume 5 of the authors' English Local Government. 1919 WEBB, BEATRICE The Wages of Men and Women: Should They Be Equal? London: Fabian Society. -> Beatrice Webb's Minority Report to the Government Committee on Equal Pay. 1920 A Constitution for the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain. London and New York: Longmans. 1921 The Consumers' Co-operative Movement. London and New York: Longmans. 1922a English Prisons Under Local Government. London and New York: Longmans. -» Volume 6 of the authors' English Local Government. 1922& Statutory Authorities for Special Purposes. London and New York: Longmans. -» Volume 4 of the authors' English Local Government. 1923a WEBB, SIDNEY The Labour Party on the Threshold. Fabian Tract No. 207. London: Fabian Society. -» The chairman's address to the annual conference of the Labour party, June 26, 1923. 1923& The Decay of Capitalist Civilisation. London: Fabian Society; Allen & Unwin. (1926) 1950 WEBB, BEATRICE My Apprenticeship. London and New York: Longmans. 1927-1929 English Poor Law History. 2 vols. in 3. London and New York: Longmans. -» Volume 1: The Old Poor Law. Volume 2: The Last Hundred Years. The work constitutes volumes 7 and 9 of the authors' English Local Government. 1928 WEBB, SIDNEY Reminiscences. St. Martin's Review [1928]:621-626. 1932 Methods of Social Study. London and New York: Longmans.
WEBER, ALFRED (1935) 1947 Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? 3d ed. New York and London: Longmans. Diaries, 1912-1924. WEBB, BEATRICE Edited by Margaret Cole. London and New York: Longmans, 1952, Diaries, 1924-1932. WEBB, BEATRICE Edited by Margaret Cole. London and New York: Longmans, 1956. Our Partnership. WEBB, BEATRICE Edited by Barbara Drake and Margaret Cole. New York: Longmans, 1948. -» A sequel to My Apprenticeship (1926). SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
BOOTH, CHARLES et al. (1889-1891) 1902-1903 Life and Labour of the People in London. 17 vols. London: Macmillan. COLE, MARGARET 1945 Beatrice Webb. London and New York: Longmans. COLE, MARGARET (editor) 1949 The Webbs and Their Work. London: Muller. COLE, MARGARET 1961 The Story of Fabian Socialism. Stanford Univ. Press. -> A paperback edition was published in 1961 by Wiley. Fabian Essays. 6th ed. (1889) 1962 London: Allen & Unwin. -» First published as Fabian Essays in Socialism, by G. B. Shaw, Sidney Webb, and others. HAMILTON, MARY A. 1933 Sidney and Beatrice Webb: A Study in Contemporary Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
WEBER, ALFRED Alfred Weber (1868-1958), German economist and sociologist, was the second son of a National Liberal politician and Prussian deputy, and the younger brother of Max Weber. He was born in Erfurt and grew up in Berlin, where his father became a city magistrate. From early youth, Alfred Weber and his brother had regular contact with the many distinguished liberal politicians and scholars who visited their home. Weber attended the University of Berlin, where, as a student of Gustav Schmoller, he was trained as a Kathedersozialist; but even then he was preoccupied with sociological ideas. In 1895 he obtained his doctor's degree from Berlin, and four years later he began to teach economics there. In 1904 he moved to the University of Prague, and in 1907 to Heidelberg, where he remained for the rest of his academic career. His Theory of the Location of Industries (1909) was perhaps the most original and permanent contribution to economic theory written in German since von Thiinen's Der isolierte Staat (published part by part between 1826 and 1863). Weber planned a second part of his 1909 work, but it never appeared. In this early work he showed that inclination toward sociological analysis which later became the core of his writings. In the Theory of the Location of Industries,
491
Weber partially adopted von Thiinen's concept of agricultural production and transformed it into an analysis of the factors influencing the location of industry during times of development and growth. The study is based on historical research into German data after 1860. First establishing certain general conditions of location, the theory then develops the concepts of transport orientation and labor orientation, and concludes with an analysis of the laws of agglomeration. According to these laws, the social factors conducive to development may be either economic—rational or social—historical. Clearly, such a theory of location is neither "pure" nor "general," since it is too closely tied to particular resources and energy sources, which have changed unpredictably in the past and will do so again in the future. If its limitations are understood, Weber's theory can be used as a guide to the proper location of industries in underdeveloped countries. During World War I, Weber worked as an expert in the treasury; and, after the German defeat, he tried unsuccessfully to become the leader of the new democratic party (Staatspartei). Although this failure marked the end of his brief political career, it gave him a comprehension of practical affairs that was invaluable in his intellectual pursuits during the second half of his life. His interests had shifted increasingly toward sociology in the period around World War I, a time when a concern with sociology was not quite respectable intellectually; speaking and writing about the "problems of civilization" were generally left to the Marxists. But for Weber, sociology provided the concepts necessary to clarify the "constellations" of cultural phenomena that he had arrived at intuitively. Weber accepted the designation of his sociology as "synoptic sociology," a term that served to distinguish it from his brother's systematic and rational approach. In the two books Deutschland und die europaische Kulturkrise (1924) and Die Krise des modernen Staatsgedankens in Europa (1925) Weber developed his sociology of politics. He saw the German defeat of 1918 as a European as well as a German catastrophe, caused by the breakdown of an old political tradition coincident with the end of European political predominance. Again, in Das Ende der Demokratie? (1931) he was concerned with the problem of political change and, more specifically, with the problem of leadership in the context of parliamentary democracy and of a society in which public opinion was liable to be managed. Even more than Burckhardt, Tocqueville, or
492
WEBER, ALFRED
Nietzsche, he emphasized the dynamic aspects of history, culture, and civilization: their essence is "movement," "action," and "progress." But he limited the notion of universal progress, accepted without question in the nineteenth century, to the single but vital sphere of modern technical civilization. In 1933 Weber asked to be retired. Having fought against Nazism for years, he lived in complete isolation after his retirement and kept on writing. Kulturgeschichte als Kultursoziologie (1935) had to be published in Holland. It is a survey of the entire history of man, in which Weber attempted to isolate the sociopolitical, the economic-technical, and the moral—cultural manifestations of social life. It is rather doubtful whether the sharp separation between culture as the realm of creativity and civilization as the realm of technical progress really applies to all the various phases of human history. Das Tragische und die Geschichte (1943) was printed in Hamburg, but the German public was forbidden to buy it. It is considered Weber's most important work, because of the way in which it combines history and sociology, and because of the contribution it makes to the understanding of Hellenism. After the Nazi collapse, Weber, nearly eighty years old, began lecturing again. In the 13 years before his death, "the grand old man of Heidelberg" (as the Americans called him) reached the peak of his influence, both as a politician—he was highly esteemed, especially by the leaders of the new Social Democratic party and the new trade unions—and as a scholar. The titles of some of the books he published in the last decade of his life, Farewell to European History: Or, the Conquest of Nihilism (1946) and Der dritte oder der vierte Mensch: Vom Sinn des geschichtlichen Daseins (1953), indicate that Weber had wrung meaning from the history of Germany and of Europe in the preceding years. Weber's synoptic sociology thus culminated in metaphysics. His later works can be compared only with the works of Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee. The depth and permanence of the influence of Spengler and Toynbee may perhaps be attributed to the relative simplicity of the concepts behind their studies of history. Spengler saw the history of peoples and nations as governed by an organic process: antiquity and Christianity have gone through the stages of birth, maturity, and death; and our own civilization is facing the last stage of decline prior to dissolution. Although Toynbee had a much wider knowledge of history
and civilization than Spengler did, he also saw the life cycle of every culture as determined by the rather simple process of challenge and response. Weber is more profound than either of them: he has deeper insight into the variety of mankind and more understanding of all of man's cultural achievements. But his creativity and his faith in intuition nevertheless make his book more a work of art than of science, and tie it to the sentiments and the philosophical beliefs of his country and of his generation. EDGAR SALIN [See also CENTRAL PLACE; SOCIOLOGY, article on THE FIELD; SPATIAL ECONOMICS; SPECIALIZATION AND EXCHANGE; and the biographies of SPENGLER; THUNEN.] WORKS BY WEBER
(1909) 1957 Theory of the Location of Industries. Univ. of Chicago Press; Cambridge Univ. Press. -> First published as "Reine Theorie des Standorts," part 1 of Uber den Standort der Industrien. 1920 Prinzipielles zur Kultursoziologie: Gesellschaftsprozess, Zivilisationsprozess und Kulturbewegung. Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 47:149. -> Issued in 1939 as "Fundamentals of Culturesociology: Social Process, Civilizational Process and Culture-movement." A mimeographed report of the Works Progress Administration and the Department of Social Science, Columbia University. 1924 Deutschland und die europdische Kulturkrise. Jena: Fischer. 1925 Die Krise des modernen Staatsgedankens in Europa. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt. 1931 Das Ende der Demokratie? Berlin: Junker & Diinnhaupt. (1935) 1950 Kulturgeschichte als Kultursoziologie. 2d enl. ed. Munich: Piper. 1943 Das Tragische und die Geschichte. Hamburg: Covert. (1946) 1948 Farewell to European History: Or, the Conquest of Nihilism. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press; London: Routledge. -> First published as Abschied von der bisherigen Geschichte: Uberwindung des Nihilismus? 1951 Prinzipien der Geschichts- und Kultursoziologie. Munich: Piper. 1953 Der dritte oder der vierte Mensch: Vom Sinn des geschichtlichen Daseins. Munich: Piper. 1955 WEBER, ALFRED (editor) Einfiihrung in die Soziologie. Munich: Piper. -> A collection of addresses, essays, and lectures by Weber and others. SUPPLEMENTARY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
KEPESZCZUK, JOSEF (compiler) 1956 Alfred Weber: Schriften und Aufsdtze, 1897-1955. Munich: Piper. -» A complete bibliography up to 1955, verified by Weber himself. NIEDERHAUSER, ELISABETH 1944 Die Standortstheorie Alfred Webers. Weinfalden (Switzerland): Neuenschwander. SALIN, EDGAR (editor) 1948 Synopsis; Festgabe fur Alfred Weber: 30. VII. 1868 bis 30. VII. 1948. Heidelberg: Schneider. SALIN, EDGAR (1958) 1963 Alfred Weber. Pages 58-74 in Edgar Salin, Lynkeus: Gestalten und Probleme aus
WEBER, MAX 493 Wirtschaft und Politik. Tubingen: Mohr. -> First published in Volume 11 of Kyklos. WALD, SALOMON 1964 Geschichte und Gegenwart im Denken Alfred Webers: Ein Versuch iiber seine soziologischen und universal-historischen Gesichtspunkte. Zurich: Polygraphischer Verlag. WILLI, VIKTOR 1953 Das Wesen der Kulturhohe und die Kulturkrise in der kultursoziologischen Sicht Alfred Webers. Paris: Sirey.
WEBER, ERNST HEINRICH Ernst Heinrich Weber (1795-1878), German anatomist and physiologist, is best known for his work in sensory physiology. Weber's law, later generalized by Gustav Theodor Fechner and now known as the Weber-Fechner law, is recognized as one of the most significant of the early attempts to quantify the relation between stimulus and sensation and, consequently, as a forerunner of modern psychophysics. Weber was born in Wittenberg, the eldest of three brothers who achieved distinction in the sciences. Most of his academic life was spent in Leipzig, where he was professor of anatomy from 1818, and of physiology from 1840. Weber's law asserts that a just-noticeable difference in the intensity of a sensation corresponds to an increase or decrease in the intensity of a stimulus by a constant fraction of its original intensity. What is called the Weber fraction or Weber ratio is thus AR/.R, where R is the stimulus and AJR is the minimal stimulus increment or decrement. It was thought at first that this fraction might prove to be constant throughout the intensity range of each modality, and that a specific constant could be found for each sense and even for such functions as spatial and temporal discrimination. Although Weber's own experiments and those of his successors have failed to confirm the universality of the law, and Fechner's reformulation has proved to be misleading, the experiments themselves represented a major contribution to sensory physiology. Weber's most important publication, "Der Tastsinn und das Gemeingefiihr (1846), was judged by E. B. Titchener (1901-1905) to be "the foundation stone of experimental psychology." Weber's researches took him into virtually every field of sensory physiology, including vision, audition, and olfaction, as well as touch; into the physiology of blood circulation; and, in collaboration with his brothers, into related areas of physics. His most enduring interest, however, was in touch. "Der Tastsinn" reports exhaustive observations on the sensitivity to stimulation of the various parts of the body, internal as well as superficial, with
speculations as to the neural basis of sensation and as to the ways in which simple sensations form the basis for the perception of external objects. Weber demonstrated the two-point threshold, measured it at various locations on his own body, and developed a neurological theory to account for it. There are, he found, "sensory circles" which represent small regions of common innervation, each of which has its own distinctive characteristics, and which provide the basis for tactual localization. In addition to the familiar modalities of sensation, Weber recognized the Gemeingefiihl ("common sensibility"—not to be confused with the sensus comrawras). By this he meant the complex of sensory experiences which we apprehend as states of ourselves rather than as properties of objects. The Gemeingefuhl has significant components of pressure, temperature, muscular sensation, and especially pain, but Weber considered it sufficiently distinctive to warrant its being classified separately. With the recent revival of interest in the body percept, Weber's conception of the Gemeingefuhl may acquire new significance. ROBERT B. MACLEOD [See also PSYCHOPHYSICS. Other relevant material may be found in HEARING; SENSES; SKIN SENSES AND KINESTHESIS; TASTE AND SMELL; VISION; and in the
biography of FECHNER.] WORKS BY WEBER De aure et auditu hominis et animalium. Leipzig: Fleischer. 1834 Annotationes anatomicae et physiologicae. Fasc. 1: De pulsu, resorptione, auditu et tactu. Leipzig: Koehler. 1846 Der Tastsinn und das Gemeingefuhl. Volume 3, pages 481-588 in Rudolph Wagner, Handworterbuch der Physiologic. Brunswick (Germany): Vieweg. 1820
SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY BORING, EDWIN G. (1929) 1950 A History of Experimental Psychology. 2d ed. New York: Appleton. TITCHENER, EDWARD B. 1901-1905 Experimental Psychology: A Manual of Laboratory Practice. 2 vols. New York and London: Macmillan. -> Volume 1: Qualitative Experiments. Volume 2: Quantitative Experiments, 2 parts.
WEBER, MAX Max Weber (1864-1920) grew up in Germany during the Bismarckian era. His father was a lawyer, and in the intellectually stimulating atmosphere of the Weber home, the boy's intellectual interests developed at an early age. Weber received an excellent secondary education in languages, history, and the classics. Beginning in 1882 he attended the universities of Heidelberg, Gottingen,
494
WEBER, MAX
and Berlin; he studied law but simultaneously acquired professional competence as an economist, historian, and philosopher. Weber took his bar examination in 1886 and completed his academic training in 1891, but his health never permitted him to hold a permanent academic position. After serving as a Privatdozent in law at the University of Berlin and as a government consultant, and having completed extensive research projects (this in the years immediately preceding and following his marriage in 1893), he became professor of economics, first at the University of Freiburg in 1894 and then at Heidelberg in 1896. In 1898, however, Weber suffered a nervous breakdown, and after he had made repeated attempts to resume teaching, the university granted him leave without pay. Incapacitated for some four years, he resumed his scholarly activities in 1903, becoming coeditor of the Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft. In 1904 he began to publish his own scholarly work. From this time on he lived as a private scholar, mostly in the city of Heidelberg, returning only briefly to more formal academic work, in Vienna and Munich in the years immediately preceding his death. Weber's work reveals his extraordinary intellectual tensions. He was a political realist and a nationalist who nevertheless criticized his country with detachment and treated national shibboleths with derision. He was an analyst of power politics who examined constitutional problems in the spirit of political engineering, yet he was deeply concerned with ethical problems and with the cultural significance of the power struggle. And there are further contradictions: he was a monarchist who openly denounced the Kaiser; later, a liberal with a pessimistic view of the masses and an awareness of the need for personal leadership; and a passionate individualist faced with the rising forces of collectivism. These tensions prevented Weber from finding outlets for his drive to act decisively and led him instead to pour his great energies into his scholarly work. But even in his scholarly work tensions prevailed. Every sentence of Weber's seems a precarious victory over the complexity of facts; despite their massive scope, his writings are fragments. Substanlively, his work bristles with an awareness of the unresolved paradoxes of the human condition, which Weber sought to understand on the basis of his extraordinary historical knowledge and to conceptualize at a level between historical description and a theory of sociological universals. Intellectual background. Diverse intellectual antecedents are revealed in Weber's work. He made
use of Kant's distinction between practical and pure reason in his analysis of the relation between knowledge and action. Hegel's distinction between state and society had set a pattern for nineteenthcentury German thought; Weber reinterpreted this distinction behavioristically, under the influence of utilitarianism and of German theories of criminal law. Like the idealist interpretation of history, Marx's materialist interpretation appeared useful to Weber, but only as a hypothesis; he rejected the doctrinaire formulations of both theories. Other influences include his legal training, the ideal-typical constructs implicit in Jakob Burckhardt's writings, the emphasis on conflict characteristic of Nietzsche and the social Darwinists, and the dialectical modes of thought characteristic of the Hegelian tradition. This sketchy list could be extended to include many other social theorists since the seventeenth century. However, Weber's position was an original one of great intellectual complexity and must be understood in its own right. Few subsequent scholars have accepted this position in its entirety, but many have profited greatly from Weber's insights and theoretical perspectives. Theoretical position. Weber took issue with several major intellectual traditions. Much is often made of his lifelong debate with the writings of Marx, but it must be remembered that he also "debated" with Hegel, with the historicists, and with the theories of social evolution and of utilitarianism. Weber's theoretical opposition to these holistic intellectual tendencies was based on his insistence that individual action is the unit of sociological analysis. Against the view that men's actions have an unintended significance, variously derived from (or imputed to) an Absolute Spirit, the necessities embodied in the organization of production, or the struggle for survival, Weber developed his concepts in terms of the meaning (Sinn) that individuals attribute to their actions in society. Indicative of Weber's approach is his critique of his friend Georg Simmel: Simmel retained elements of the Hegelian tradition and therefore, according to Weber, frequently and illegitimately shifted the ground of his analysis from the meaning intended by the individual to the transpersonal meaning revealed in and through the reciprocal effects (Wechselwirkungen) of individuals upon each other. Weber's theoretical starting point exposed him to two dangers: on the one hand, he risked a radical subjectivism, represented at the time by the utilitarian tradition, and on the other, he risked the antiscientific orientation of the historicists. However, Weber avoided both these dangers.
WEBER, MAX 495 Utilitarianism had sought to derive economic and political structures from a hedonistic calculus of individual actions, a procedure developed further during Weber's lifetime by the marginal utility school of economics [see UTILITY]. Weber opposed this approach on empirical and methodological grounds. Empirically he showed that not even economic conduct has "self interest" as its ultima ratio but involves values and judgments that reflect the normative social context from which utilitarianism artificially isolated the individual. His methodological objection to utilitarianism was that any calculus of happiness necessarily operates with a mixture of "is" and "ought" that is scientifically inadmissible. Weber sought to show that this "individualistic theory" is not in fact a set of generalizations or a body of laws but that it is best interpreted as a model constructed out of abstractions from elementary forms of behavior and best employed as a reference point for the systematic observation of behavior. In this fashion Weber moved away from a radically individualistic position but was able to maintain his nominalist view of individual action as the basic datum of sociological inquiry. Finally, Weber sought to refute the historicist school by emphasizing that studies of culture and history cannot avoid the use of typological concepts, and that the most important task is, therefore, to attempt to make these concepts explicit. In protest against the rationalism of the Enlightenment, and building on the romantic appreciation of the uniqueness of the individual personality and of the national culture, historicism asserted the uniqueness of constellations of historical events. Weber, however, refused to accept the historicist claim that disciplines dealing with historical constellations are generically different from the natural sciences, even though the latter deal with recurrent events and discover general laws or regularities of high probability. Instead of producing speculative arguments about the nature of the reality studied by the different disciplines, he examined the procedures used in their scholarly inquiries. In his view, cultural studies are distinctive only in that they originate in the investigator's sense of what is culturally significant. But once a question has been accepted as significant, it is necessary to formulate concepts that will present the relevant evidence "systematically and in greater unity than has ever existed in the actual course of development"; these "ideal types" can then be employed as reference points for the analysis of behavior. A strategic element in Weber's confrontation of the Marxists, the utilitarians, and the historicist school was his insistence on a "value-free" social
science. While the Marxists construed the truth of social scientific assertions as contingent on history, Weber's concept permitted him to assert the possibility of arriving at a scientific study of society by separating personal evaluation from scientific judgments. Although scientists may bring values and concepts to their subject matter, they must take care that they do not inadvertently confuse their own values and ideas with those of the actors they are studying. This was the mistake the utilitarians had made when they identified goodness with utility. And against the antiscientific particularism of the historicist school, Weber was able to legitimize the scientific approach both by recognizing and delimiting the subjective dimension of the cultural significance of historical studies and by emphasizing the indispensability of concepts in historical analysis (see Max Weber on the Methodology of the Social Sciences'). The debate concerning the significance of Weber's position continues, but it is our first obligation to understand him as he wanted to be understood. It is his adoption of a nominalist position in social science that is of key importance in his critiques of Marxism, of theories of evolution, and of the historical school. Analysis of social structure An early example of Weber's approach to the analysis of social structure is his investigation, in the 1890s, of farm labor conditions east of the Elbe. The study was stimulated by a nationalist concern with the exodus of Germans and the influx of Slavic migrant workers, but Weber's inquiry centered on the growth of individualism among farm laborers, who preferred the risks of urban independence to the security of personal subservience on rural estates, even at the cost of a loss in income. Weber saw in this individualism evidence for the independent influence of ideas, a prominent theme throughout his work. He also made this specific inquiry the occasion for a more general analysis of Imperial Germany. According to Weber, the Junker had been effective landlords, local administrators, and military men when they established the power of the Prussian state, but during the nineteenth century they had become rural capitalists who bolstered their declining economic position by political blackmail. Moreover, the quasi-commercialization of the Junker was paralleled by a quasi-aristocratization of the middle-class industrialists who bought land in the east for the sake of titles and of bureaucratic or military careers for their sons. Weber thus broadened his study of the farm-labor problem into an analysis of social structure—of the interplay of
496
WEBER, MAX
"material and ideal interests" in the interactions of classes and status groups in Imperial Germany. He later used this approach in his comparative studies of religious ideas and economic conduct. Sociology of religion The Protestant ethic. Weber's studies in the sociology of religion began with the publication of his famous essay, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-1905). Two observations provided the initial impetus for the essay: (1) that in many parts of the world great material achievements had resulted from the work of monastic orders dedicated to a life of the spirit; and (2) that ascetic Protestant sects were noted for their economic success, especially in the early phase of modern capitalism. There appeared to exist a paradoxically positive relationship between ascetic religious belief and economic enterprise, in spite of the fact that the great Protestant reformers had anathematized the pursuit of riches as dangerous to the soul and that the pursuit of riches had so often been accompanied by a life of adventure and display, as well as by religious indifference. Weber began to resolve the challenging paradox by noting that both Puritan religion and capitalist enterprise are characterized to an unusual degree by a systematization of life; this suggested a source of affinities between the two. His inquiry showed the interrelation of three processes: the incentives for action in this world that are implicit in Calvinist theology, as contrasted with Roman Catholic and Lutheran theology; the ways in which Puritan divines of the seventeenth century interpreted Calvinist themes in their pastoral exhortations; and the process by which theological doctrines and pastoral advice became effective social controls. Weber first analyzed the implications of the doctrine of predestination; this analysis is a good example of his more general studies of religious doctrines. He deduced that an unfathomable divine decision concerning the fate of men in the hereafter would produce great anxiety among a people intensely concerned with the salvation of their souls, and he assumed that this anxiety was at its height in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Such religious anxiety could not be allayed by Reformation leaders like Calvin and Zwingli, who creatively reoriented the human situation and did not influence men directly. Only the pastoral interpretations of the theological doctrines could allay this anxiety. Calvin taught that everyone must face the ultimate uncertainty of his fate; nevertheless, ministers encouraged their congregations to engage in a zealous and self-denying round of daily activities, mindful that God had put the resources of his
created world at the disposal of men who on the day of judgment would be responsible to him for the single-minded, work-oriented use of all their powers in his service. True believers responded with an "inner-worldly asceticism," as Weber called it, which enabled them to quiet their consciences by rationally transforming the world in which God had placed them. Pastoral admonition is, of course, an uncertain index of conduct; moreover, the accumulation of wealth by ascetic Protestants appears paradoxical partly because, historically, wealth has been associated with attenuated belief rather than piety. Weber's analysis helped to resolve this paradox. He showed that Puritan wealth was an unintended consequence of the anxieties aroused by the doctrine of predestination. Because members of the Calvinist congregation accepted the interpretations of that doctrine offered by the Puritan divines, they led frugal, active lives that resulted in the accumulation of wealth. Weber acknowledged that further research on this relationship was needed, especially documentary research on diaries and autobiographies of entrepreneurs of the seventeenth century that might contain direct evidence concerning the relationship between religious belief and economic activities. His essay "The Protestant Sects" (1906) provides one such supplement by describing the methods used to inculcate moral tenets upon members of Puritan sects. [See CHRISTIANITY and the biography of TAWNEY.] Comparative religion. Weber did not pursue the study of Puritanism further, in part because his friend, the theologian Ernst Troeltsch, had undertaken a related and more elaborate study, published subsequently, in 1912, as The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches [see the biography of TROELTSCH]. Instead, he made the important decision to work on a large-scale comparative sociology of world religions that would examine the social foundations of religious beliefs and practices as well as the inner-worldly repercussions of religious doctrine. In part, the aim of his works on Confucianism and Taoism, Hinduism and Buddhism, and Judaism was not essentially different from that of The Protestant Ethic—it was to characterize and explain the distinguishing traits of different kinds of religious belief and to trace the unintended, but nonetheless important, consequences of different theological doctrines for the orientation that men bring to their economic activities. Weber wished to demonstrate, for example, that in Confucianism and Hinduism particular doctrines had had an inhibiting effect on economic rationality, even under circumstances that were generally con-
WEBER, MAX 497 ducive to capitalist development. By comparing different religious systems he hoped to achieve a better understanding of what it was about Western religion that had made it a major influence in the development of western European capitalism; thus he would strengthen, albeit indirectly, the persuasiveness of his original thesis concerning Protestantism. At the same time, Weber wanted to go beyond a narrow focus on the indirect impact of ideas on behavior by examining in detail the "anchorage" of religious ideas in social organization. He noted three forms of relationship between social organization and religious ideas that warranted investigation. First, social groups with particular economic interests often show themselves to be more receptive to some religious ideas than to others. For example, peasants typically incline toward some form of nature worship, aristocrats toward religious ideas compatible with their sense of status and dignity. Second, religious ideas lead to the formation of certain groups, such as monastic orders, guilds of magicians, or a clergy, and these groups may develop quite extensive economic activities. Third, the distinction between the elite and the masses is as pertinent to the religious sphere as to others: in that sphere also, men tend to be divided into a minority which originates ideas and is unusually perceptive and a majority with ordinary interests and average capabilities. The gap between the elite and the masses poses a problem with which each of the great world religions has had to cope. To understand the process by which the messages of promise and the ideals of conduct proclaimed by religious leaders have become institutionalized, it is necessary to recognize not only that religious innovators and functionaries inevitably become involved in practical affairs, but also that the masses, in the midst of their pressing daily concerns, seek the satisfaction or reassurance of ritual and belief. Confucianism. In his book on China (1915), Weber analyzed the interaction between religious ideas and social organization in the context of the wider social structure. He gave special attention to the long-run balance of power between the Chinese emperor, the central and provincial bureaucracy, and the kinship organization of the local community. Although the elements in the balance varied, it remained true that "patrimonial rule from above clashed with the kinship group's strong counterbalance from below." At the "top," the policy of rapid turnover in office and a lay educational system that emphasized conventional propriety and classical learning strengthened patrimonial rule. Also, by encouraging competition for office, the famous examination system minimized the threat
to the emperor while it maximized the interest of local kin groups in urging young men to succeed, since appointment to office promised prestige, income, and influence not only for the incumbent but for his relatives as well. Confucianism strengthened the status consciousness of the official, but at the same time, since Confucianism taught that filial piety and ancestor worship were duties required of everyone, it also strengthened the cohesion of kin groups and facilitated local resistance to official measures. Confucianism, then, according to Weber, was a belief system that supported both the bureaucratic order and the kinship structure, thus helping to sustain tension between these two structures. In this instance Weber laid emphasis on the fit between a belief system and a social structure. Hinduism. A different relationship—between religious beliefs and the status interests of the foremost exponents of them—may be illustrated by Weber's study of India (1916-1917). The Brahmans were a somewhat diverse group of royal chaplains, family priests, theologians, and jurists, who served as spiritual advisors and administrators, teachers, consultants, and authorities on questions of ritual propriety. The income of the Brahmans consisted of fixed rents derived from land and of "gifts" in return for their services. This income was enjoyed for life, or even for generations. The status interests of the Brahmans were related not only to economic rewards for the performance of their roles but also to keeping priestly roles concentrated in their hands. Although Confucian writing excoriated magical practices, the Brahmans, as a priestly caste, could not relegate the concern with magic powers to popular conjurers who might compete with priests. In India the magical powers of the ascetic were revered, and the problem for the Brahmans was to reconcile magic with their status interests as an educated, religious elite. With his characteristic sensitivity to world views other than his own, Weber explored the ramifications of the Brahman position, especially the way in which Indian philosophers and religious leaders achieved a "systematic rationalization of magic" and effected a compromise between their own elite interest in a dignified way of life and their need to provide for the masses magical release from the misfortunes that were their lot. Analysis of social action Although it remained unfinished, Weber's Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft ranks among the classics of modern social science (1922a). Its influence stems from its wealth of concepts, formulated on the basis of a wide range of comparative historical
498
WEBER, MAX
materials. These concepts have often since been used in an ahistorical manner, but this was not Weber's purpose. Rather than formulate a theoretical system of his own, he tried to provide a more secure foundation for sociology and history by specifying the meaning of ideas and concepts that were widely used at the time. Once again, instead of adopting either a holistic or a particularistic (or subjectivist) approach, Weber hoped to occupy an intermediate position, moving from historical evidence to the formulation of concepts, and from concepts back to historical evidence. In this spirit he began the chapter "Religionssoziologie" with the comment that a definition of religion is, properly speaking, the result of an extensive inquiry rather than its beginning. In his formulation of types of prophecy on the basis of the Biblical text, or of the distinction between Oriental and Occidental cities, or of types of capitalist enterprise, or of feudalism, or again of the relation between priestly and ruling elites, he demonstrated what he meant by this approach. The first part of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft is a compendium of concepts; the second is a descriptive and comparative treatment of the social conditions and consequences of economic behavior. Economic behavior is the ostensible focus of attention, but the thematic core is the establishment of categories for the analysis of action, as is suggested by the initial definitions. These definitions emphasize the importance of meaning (Sinn) as an aspect of man's behavior in society. Such meaning has an individual as well as a social dimension, as Weber's definition of the subject matter of sociology makes clear: ". . . in 'action' is included all human behaviour when and in so far as, ... by virtue of the subjective meaning attached to it by the acting individual (or individuals), it takes account of the behaviour of others and is thereby oriented in its course" ([1922b] 1957, p. 88). Weber pointed out that although much action in society is characterized by almost unconscious conformity, there is nevertheless a rudimentary consciousness of meaning even in such conventional behavior. Weber drew attention to the difference between this minimally meaningful conventional action and innovative action, although he insisted that it is essential to consider such individual inspiration in its social setting. It was characteristic of him to combine sharp distinctions with an awareness that in society analytically distinct features are often concretely joined. One consequence of Weber's primary concern with action and its meaning was his conceptualization of collectivities in terms of social behavior
rather than of structures. In the text of his book even the words of the title appear in modified forms suggesting processes. Thus, instead of "economy" (Wirtschaft) the text refers to economic activities (Wirtschaften), and instead of "society" (Gesellschaft) it refers to society-forming activities (Vergesellschaftung ). Weber analyzed the sense, or meaning, of human action at many levels, three of which may be considered basic, since they provide an organizing framework for Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (to be sure, some uncertainty remains concerning Weber's intended organization, since the work was unfinished, and various editors have added subtitles). The three levels have to do, respectively, with the components of material interest, feelings of affinity, and authority in social relationships. First of all, Weber was concerned with processes of group formation based on material interest. He discussed such associations as those of brokers, based on market relations; business firms based on bookkeeping methods (as distinguished from family firms, which combine business and household management and are not limited to material interests); trading and financial enterprises based on "booty"; the oathbound associations that played a major role in the autonomous development of cities in western Europe; and many others. As he defined social classes, they too belonged in the category of groups based on material interests, since the concept of social class designated for him the "market situation" common to a group of people, who thereby have a broadly similar chance to dispose of goods or skills for the sake of income. Second, Weber analyzed processes of group formation based on feelings of affinity. In this connection he discussed the household community, the neighborhood, extended kin groups (Sippen), estates and status groups (Stande), religious communities, and others. These groups are all formed on the basis of shared beliefs in what is honorable and proper. They come to have common styles of life, and these are buttressed, in turn, by segregating restrictions on hospitality and intermarriage. Such restrictions are often also the bases of economic monopolies and of military organization, that is, of organizations based on material interest. The interplay of these two levels of abstraction is a recurrent theme in Weber's work: he inquired into the ideas and feelings of affinity involved in actions ostensibly prompted by economic interests only, as well as into the economic interests of status groups and religious elites. At a third level Weber identified social relationships based on the exercise of authority. Reinterpreting the distinction between society and the state, Weber differentiated between
WEBER, MAX those groups based on common interest or affinity and those based on hierarchic organization and a shared belief in a legitimate order of authority. Types of authority Weber believed that the exercise of authority is a universal phenomenon and that there are three types of domination that characterize authority relationships: charismatic, traditional, and legal domination. These types indicate the relationships between a supreme ruler (e.g., a prophet, a king, or a parliament), an administrative body (e.g., disciples, royal servants, or officials) and the masses of the ruled (e.g., followers, subjects, or citizens). Under charismatic domination, the ruler's exercise of authority rests on extraordinary qualities which both he and his followers believe to be inspired by some transcendent power; under traditional domination, the ruler is bound by immemorial custom that also sanctions his right to the arbitrary exercise of his will; and under legal domination, the exercise of authority is subject to a system of generalized rules. [See LEADERSHIP, article on SOCIOLOGICAL ASPECTS.] Weber held that if rulers fail to justify their domination in terms of charisma, tradition, or law, they thereby tend to undermine the belief in these standards among officials and the public at large; if such illegitimacy continues long enough and if compensating factors are absent, the type of domination will change. Thus, under charismatic domination, belief in the very existence of charisma may be undermined by the ruler's excessive claims to miraculous attributes or by too insistent demands by his followers that he give proof of such attributes. Similarly, too much arbitrariness can undermine the authority of the sacred tradition that justifies the dominion of the traditional ruler. And for the rule of law to endure, it is essential that there be a balance of the conflicting imperatives of formal and substantive legal rationality. Weber's open-ended formulation of the three types of authority suggests that these types should be treated not as labels to be applied to social phenomena but as concepts on which to base programs of research, as Weber's book-length chapter on the sociology of law makes clear. However, the uneven reception of his work and the tendency to reify concepts like "charisma" and "bureaucracy" have militated against the appropriate utilization of Weber's ideas. Impact of Weber's work The above bare outline of Weber's work cannot convey a sense of the richness of his materials and insights, but it may be possible to character-
499
ize the power of his work by describing some of the studies that have been stimulated by his ideas. Religion and economic behavior. Weber's essay on the Protestant ethic initiated a great controversy that began in his lifetime and shows no signs of abating. Broadly speaking, three approaches characterize this extensive literature: one is concerned with what Weber meant; one seeks to amplify, correct, or refute the empirical relationship asserted by Weber between religious belief and economic behavior; and still another supplements Weber's thesis by examining this relationship in other contexts than those posited by him. While much of the earlier literature dealt with the first two topics (see the survey in Fischoff 1944), more recently the third topic has become salient, and historians, psychologists, and sociologists are grappling once again with Weber's original problem of the unique development of Western institutions and the possibility that they have functional equivalents elsewhere. [See, for instance, ECONOMIC GROWTH, article On NONECONOMIC ASPECTS.] Ideal types. Inherent in all of Weber's work is a methodological problem that has also stimulated scholarly activity. In his world-historical, comparative studies, Weber made use of bench-mark concepts, called ideal types, which deliberately simplify and exaggerate the evidence; examples are his formulation of the theological doctrines of Luther and Calvin, his typology of domination or of urban communities, and so on. At the world-historical level, which was of primary interest to Weber, this method produces useful major distinctions, such as those between patrimonialism and feudalism, between Occidental and Oriental cities, between Confucian and Puritan religious beliefs, between ethical and exemplary prophecy, and many others. Weber himself always emphasized both the "infinite manifold" of the reality to be investigated and the need to exaggerate distinctions for purposes of conceptual clarity. Accordingly, he saw his task as first the formulation of ideal types on the basis of comparative historical evidence, and then the analysis of the subject under investigation in terms of its deviation from, or approximation to, these concepts [see TYPOLOGIES]. Yet this second step poses difficulties which he did not resolve; they have been discussed by Schweitzer (1964) and by Lazarsfeld and Oberschall (1965). Weber never dealt satisfactorily with the question of how the ideal-typical implications of such a doctrine as predestination, which are compelling for the true believer, are internalized by ordinary believers, with all their vacillations and compromises. In his comparative sociology of religion he did emphasize that theological doctrines always ac-
500
WEBER, MAX
commodate themselves to the exigencies of daily life, but his attention was focused on the over-all tendencies distinguishing one civilization from another rather than on the extent to which the accommodations of theology and popular practice might tend to diminish these distinctions. Studies have been conducted relating the macroscopic level (at which it is useful to stress differences) and the microscopic level more closely, and examining functional equivalents of the Protestant ethic in other civilizations. For example, Bellah (1957) and Dore (1965) have done such studies for Japan; Bendix (1964) for the Soviet Union; Merton (1938; 1949) has studied the impact of the Protestant ethic on the development of science; McClelland (1961) has examined inner-worldly asceticism as a psychological syndrome; Nelson (1949) has studied the development of ethical universalism in Christian theology; and Miiller-Armack (1959) has studied the secularization of the Protestant ethic. Bureaucracy. Similar extensions have been made of other aspects of Weber's work, for example, of his analysis of bureaucracy. Weber's typological discussion of domination and of the relationship of domination to bureaucracy seems most clear-cut when he contrasted bureaucracy and the rule of law with the administrative and legal structure under patrimonialism, while its analytic power is diminished when he was dealing with the study of politics and bureaucratic behavior under existing legal systems (this has been pointed out by Bendix 1956; Blau 1963; Crozier 1963; Delany 1963; Luhmann 1964; Schweitzer 1964). Here also the task remains of encompassing both the macroscopic and microscopic perspectives, a task begun by Weber himself in his political writings; it is noteworthy how useful Weber's approach proves to be even in contexts entirely outside his analysis, as in the study of African political systems (Apter 1955; Fallers 1956; Smith 1960). Impact in other areas. It is significant that some aspects of Weber's work have been used as starting points for scholarly work that goes beyond his own frame of reference. A notable example is the work of Otto Hintze on comparative constitutional developments (1902-1932). At the theoretical level Talcott Parsons has synthesized Weber's analysis of action with the structural-functional sociology of Durkheim. A third example is the analysis of emerging political communities and the reinterpretation of charisma by Edward Shils (1958; 1959-1960; 1965). These are only some prominent instances of the remarkable influence of Weber's work; its many-sided intellectual perspectives and penetrating insights have proved more stimulating
than a number of earlier and more integrated systems of sociological thought. A final assessment of Weber's importance is premature. Comparison of Weber's work with that of Marx and Freud shows that his work lacks the central idea or theorem that could have served as the nucleus for the development of a school, nor does it have the same direct intellectual impact on the modern Weltanschauung that theirs does. Yet in the development of the social sciences, Weber's influence may in the end surpass that of Marx or Freud. One can observe a renewal of interest in Weber's contributions since the end of World War n, a period which coincides with a reversal of the European expansion that began in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Weber sought to account for the unique development of Western civilization, to comprehend what Occidental rationalism has contributed and the agonizing dilemmas it has produced in many spheres of life. He developed a remarkably probing and sympathetic understanding of alien world views, while affirming the cultural significance of his own civilization. Such work may well become increasingly relevant to the generation now growing to maturity, as it must come to terms with a world in which the values of Western civilization are challenged. REINHARD BENDIX [Weber's ideas pervade the social sciences; their influence is especially evident in the entries ADMINISTRATION; ALIENATION; AUTHORITY; BUREAUCRACY; CHARISMA; CHINESE SOCIETY; CHRISTIANITY; CITY; ECONOMY AND SOCIETY; EMPIRES; ETHICS, article On ETHICAL SYSTEMS AND SOCIAL STRUCTURES; IDEOLOGY; INTELLECTUALS; INTERACTION, article on SOCIAL INTERACTION; LAW; LEGAL SYSTEMS, article On COMPARATIVE LAW AND LEGAL SYSTEMS; LEGITIMACY; MILLENARISM; ORGANIZATIONS, article on THEORIES OF ORGANIZATIONS; POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY; POLITICAL THEORY; POLITICS, COMPARATIVE; POWER; PROFESSIONS; RELIGION; RELIGIOUS ORGANIZATION; RELIGIOUS SPECIALISTS; SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS; SOCIAL MOVEMENTS; SOCIETY; SOCIOLOGY; STATUS, SOCIAL; STRATIFICATION, SOCIAL. Other relevant material may be found in BUDDHISM; CASTE; CREATIVITY, article on SOCIAL ASPECTS; EDUCATION; GAMBLING; HINDUISM; INDIAN POLITICAL THOUGHT; JOURNALISM; JUDAISM; LEADERSHIP, article on SOCIOLOGICAL ASPECTS; MARXIST SOCIOLOGY; MASS SOCIETY; POLITICAL ANTHROPOLOGY, article on POLITICAL ORGANIZATION; POLITICAL RECRUITMENT AND CAREERS; SECTS AND CULTS; UTILITARIANISM, article on SOCIOLOGICAL THOUGHT; and in the biographies of BURCKHARDT; HALEVY; HEGEL; HlNTZE; JELLINEK; KNIES; MANNHEIM; MARX; MlCHELS;
WEBER, MAX 501 MILLS; OSTROGORSKII; ScHUTZ; SlMMEL; SOMBART; TROELTSCH.] Weber -published -many articles and a number of pamphlets during his lifetime, but his multivolume work, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, did not appear until after his death in 1920. Many of his previously published writings were put together, often in expanded versions, in the Gesammelte Aufsatze zur Religionssoziologie (1920-1921) and other collections, and the completed portions of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft were published posthumously in 1922. In the bibliographies of many articles in this encyclopedia, the date of Weber's final version of a particular item (i.e., the date of its first posthumous publication) has been presented as the date of first publication. In this bibliography, however, the dates of publication of the original versions of these items have been given. WORKS BY WEBER
(1896) 1950 The Social Causes of Decay of Ancient Civilization. Journal of General Education 5:75-88. -» First published in the journal Wahrheit. (1904-1905) 1930 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons, with a foreword by R. H. Tawney. London: Allen & Unwin; New York: Scribner. -> First published in German. The 1930 edition has been reprinted frequently. A paperback edition was published in 1958 by Scribner. (1906) 1946 The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism. Pages 302-322 in Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. -> A greatly enlarged version of an article originally published in the Frankfurter Zeitung. (1915) 1951 The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. -» First published as "Konfuzianismus und Taoismus" in the Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und Socialpolitik; subsequently published as Volume 1 of Weber's Gesammelte Aufsatze zur Religionssoziologie. (1916-1917) 1958 The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism. Translated and edited by Hans H. Gerth and Don Martindale. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. -» First published as "Hinduismus und Buddhismus" in the Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und Socialpolitik; subsequently published as Volume 2 of Weber's Gesammelte Aufsatze zur Religionssoziologie. (1917-1919) 1952 Ancient Judaism. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. -» First published as "Das antike Judentum" in the Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und Socialpolitik; subsequently published as Volume 3 of Weber's Gesammelte Aufsatze zur Religionssoziologie. (1919-1920) 1950 General Economic History. Translated by Frank H. Knight. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. -> Contains lectures delivered in 1919-1920, and first published in 1923. The Knight translation was first published in 1927. A paperback edition was published in 1961. (1921a) 1958 The City. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. -» First published as Die Stadt. (1921&) 1958 The Rational and Social Foundations of Music. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press. -» First published in German. (1922a) 1956 Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie. 4th ed. 2 vols. Tubingen (Germany): Mohr. -> A new and complete translation of this work is scheduled for publication by the Bedminster Press in 1968. (1922&) 1957 The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. Translated and edited by A. M. Henderson and
Talcott Parsons. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. -» First published as Volume 1, Part 1 of Weber (1922a). A paperback edition was published in 1964. (1922c) 1954 Max Weber on Law in Economy and Society. Edited, with an introduction and annotations, by Max Rheinstein. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. -» First published as Volume 1, Part 2 of Weber (1922a). (1922d) 1963 The Sociology of Religion. Boston: Beacon. -» First published as Volume 2, Chapter 4 of Weber (1922a); also, in the same year, as Religionssoziologie. A paperback edition was published in 1964. (1922e) 1961 The Three Types of Legitimate Rule. Pages 4-14 in Amitai Etzioni (editor), Complex Organizations: A Sociological Reader. New York: Holt. -> First published in the Preussische Jahrbiicher. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Translated and edited by Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1946. -» Contains essays first written or published between 1906 and 1924. A paperback edition was published in 1958. Gesammelte Aufsatze zur Religionssoziologie. 2d ed. 3 vols. Tubingen (Germany): Mohr, 1922-1923. -* Contains studies first published between 1904 and 1921. Volume 1: Die Protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus. Die Protestantischen Sekten und der Geist des Kapitalismus. Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen. Volume 2: Hinduismus und Buddhismus. Volume 3: Das antike Judentum. Gesammelte Aufsatze zur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte. Tubingen: Mohr, 1924. Gesammelte politische Schriften. 2d ed. enl. Tubingen (Germany): Mohr, 1958. Max Weber on the Methodology of the Social Sciences. Translated and edited by Edward Shils and H. A. Finch. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1949. -> Contains three essays, two of which were published in the Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik in 1904 and 1905; and a third essay first published in Logos in 1917. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
AFTER, DAVID E. (1955) 1963 Ghana in Transition. Rev. ed. New York: Atheneum. -> First published as The Gold Coast in Transition. ARON, RAYMOND (1935) 1957 German Sociology. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. -> First published in French. BELLAH, ROBERT N. 1957 Tokugawa Religion: The Values of Pre-industrial Japan. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. BENDIX, REINHARD 1956 Work and Authority in Industry: Ideologies of Management in the Course of Industrialization. New York: Wiley. -> A paperback edition was published in 1963 by Harper. BENDIX, REINHARD (1960) 1962 Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. BENDIX, REINHARD 1964 Nation-building and Citizenship: Studies of Our Changing Social Order. New York: Wiley. BLAU, PETER M. 1963 Critical Remarks on Weber's Theory of Authority. American Political Science Review 57:305-316. CROZIER, MICHEL (1963) 1964 The Bureaucratic Phenomenon. Univ. of Chicago Press. -» First published as Le phenomene bureaucratique. DELANY, WILLIAM 1963 The Development and Decline of Patrimonial and Bureaucratic Administration. Administrative Science Quarterly 7:458-501.
502
WEIDENREICH, FRANZ
DORE, RONALD P. 1965 Education in Tokugawa Japan. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press. FALLERS, LLOYD A. (1956) 1965 Bantu Bureaucracy: A Century of Political Evolution. Univ. of Chicago Press. -> First published as Bantu Bureaucracy: A Study of Integration and Conflict in the Political Institutions of an East African People. FISCHOFF, EPHRAIM 1944 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: The History of a Controversy. Social Research 11:53-77.
GERTH, HANS H.; and GERTH, HEDWIG I. (compilers) 1949 Bibliography on Max Weber. Social Research 16:70-89. GERTH, HANS H.; and MILLS, C. WRIGHT 1946 Introduction. In Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Translated and edited by Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. -> A paperback edition was published in 1958. HENRICH, DIETER 1952 Die Einheit der Wissenschaftslehre Max Webers. Tubingen (Germany): Mohr. HINTZE, OTTO (1902-1932)1962 Staat und Verfassung: Gesammelte Abhandlungen zur allgemeinen Verfassungsgeschichte. 2d ed., enl. Gottingen (Germany): Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. HUGHES, H. STUART 1958 Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 18901930. New York: Knopf.
KENNEDY, ROBERT E. JR. 1962 The Protestant Ethic and the Parsis. American Journal of Sociology 68:11-20. LAZARSFELD, PAUL F.; and OBERSCHALL, ANTHONY R. 1965 Max Weber and Empirical Social Research. American Sociological Review 30:185-199. LUHMANN, NIKLAS 1964 Zweck—Herrschaft—System, Grundbegriffe und Pramissen Max Webers. Staat 3: 129-158. MCCLELLAND, DAVID C. 1961 The Achieving Society. Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand. Max Weber, 1864-1964. 1964 Sociological Quarterly 5: 304-404. -» Contains a comprehensive bibliography. MERTON, ROBERT K. (1938) 1967 Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England. New York: Fertig. -> First published in Volume 4 of Osiris. MERTON, ROBERT K. (1949)1957 Social Theory and Social Structure. Rev. & enl. ed. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. MOMMSEN, WOLFGANG 1959 Max Weber und die deutsche Politik, 1890-1920. Tubingen (Germany): Mohr. MULLER-ARMACK, ALFRED 1959 Religion und Wirtschaft. Stuttgart (Germany): Kohlhammer. NELSON, BENJAMIN N. 1949 The Idea of Usury: From Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood. Princeton Univ. Press.
PARSONS, TALCOTT (1937)1949 The Structure of Social Action: A Study in Social Theory With Special Reference to a Group of Recent European Writers. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. -» Contains an extensive discussion of Weber's ideas and an analysis of his major works. PARSONS, TALCOTT (1947) 1957 Introduction. In Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. Translated and edited by A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons. New York: Free Press. PARSONS, TALCOTT 1951 The Social System. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. SCHELTING, ALEXANDER VON 1934 Max Webers Wissenschaftslehre: Das logische Problem der historischen Kulturerkenntnis; die Grenzen der Soziologie des Wissens. Tubingen (Germany): Mohr.
SCHWEITZER, ARTHUR 1964 Vom Idealtypus zum Prototyp. Zeitschrift fiir die gesamte Staatswissenschaft 120:13-55.
SHILS, EDWARD 1958 The Concentration and Dispersion of Charisma: Their Bearing on Economic Policy in Underdeveloped Countries. World Politics 11:1-19. SHILS, EDWARD (1959-1960) 1962 Political Development in the New States. The Hague: Mouton. -> First published in Volume 2 of Comparative Studies in Society and History.
SHILS, EDWARD 1965 Charisma, Order and Status. American Sociological Review 30:199-213. SMITH, M. G. 1960 Government in Zazzau: 1800-1950. Oxford Univ. Press. WEBER, MARIANNE (SCHNITZER) (1926) 1950 Max Weber: Ein Lebensbild. Heidelberg (Germany): Schneider. -» Contains a chronologically arranged bibliography of Max Weber's writings. WINCKELMANN, JOHANNES 1960 Verzeichnis der Schriften Max Webers. Pages 490-507 in Max Weber, Soziologie, weltgeschichtliche Analysen, Politik. Stuttgart (Germany): Kroner.
WEIDENREICH, FRANZ Franz Weidenreich (1873-1948), anatomist and anthropologist, was born in Germany. After attending the Gymnasium in Landau, he spent six years studying medicine in Munich, Kiel, Berlin, and in Strasbourg, where he received his M.D. in 1899. He taught anatomy at the universities of Strasbourg and Frankfurt and in 1904 was appointed professor of anatomy at Strasbourg. By 1914 he had published 54 papers, mostly concerned with blood. He was interested in bone and connective tissue, and his anthropological interests commenced with a paper on the chin (1904) and with one on upright posture (1913). Not only did World War i interrupt Weidenreich's work but it resulted in his dismissal as professor of anatomy when the French took over Strasbourg. In 1921 Weidenreich became professor of anatomy at Heidelberg. His interest in blood continued, but his interest in bone and evolution became much more pronounced. His publications on the foot, the skull, domestication, and race foreshadowed the basic thinking of all his later work. In 1928 he described the Ehringsdorf skull, and in the same year he moved to the University of Frankfurt. There he continued to publish work on blood, bone, teeth, and connective tissue; in addition, he wrote papers on fossil man and on the evolution of the hand and the foot. His Jewish family background and his work on race brought Weidenreich into conflict with the German authorities; after leaving Germany, he went to the University of Chicago as a visiting professor in 1934. In 1935 he became professor of anatomy at Peking Union Medical College and honorary director of the Cenozoic Research Laboratory. There he prepared a series of monographs
WELFARE on Peking man, including works on the mandibles (1936a), dentition (1937), extremity bones (1941), and the skull (1943). In 1941 Weidenreich moved again, and he spent his final years at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. During his last ten years Weidenreich's numerous papers dealt exclusively with human evolution, but they were enriched by the profound anatomical understanding that he had derived from his earlier work. Although the original specimens of Peking man were lost during World War n, comparable Pithecanthropus erectus fossils became available for study. The Dutch paleontologist G. H. R. von Koenigswald had survived his experiences in a Japanese prison camp and, with the financial assistance of the Viking Fund, had gone to New York, taking original specimens of Pithecanthropus from Java. Many of Weidenreich's last writings, especially the monograph "Giant Early Man" (1945a), were concerned with the specimens found by von Koenigswald. Weidenreich summarized his views on human evolution in six lectures, later published as the book Apes, Giants and Man (1946), and in a review article, "The Trend of Human Evolution" (1947a). He believed that human evolution was fundamentally orthogenetic in character. The principal trends that changed an ancestral ape to man were interconnected and consisted of bipedalism, increase in brain size and decrease in face size, and decrease in massiveness in the final giant man, ancient man, modern man series. Weidenreich, like most east European and German paleoanatomists, never accepted Piltdown man, maintaining that the lower jaw was that of an ape. Nor did he ever accept early Pleistocene Homo sapiens, and he believed that mankind comprised only one species from before the time of Java man. Although he saw continuity of structural differences in each of the major geographical areas of the Old World, he believed that there had been genetic connections among all the areas throughout the Pleistocene period (1946); contrary to the misrepresentations of his views on the origin of races, he never proposed a multilineal sequence of human evolution. Weidenreich's fossil descriptions remain unequaled. His general chronological arrangement of their forms still appears to be essentially correct, although recent discoveries of jaws show Gigantopithecus to be an ape and not, as Weidenreich had suspected, an early man. Probably no other person contributed more to the study of human evolution than did Weidenreich. In spite of persecution, the loss of two posi-
503
tions for political reasons, and great personal difficulties, he remained a helpful, friendly person. He welcomed colleagues and students who wanted to see the fossils and his still unpublished material. "Pick it up," he would say, "it's the original!" In the few years he was in the United States Weidenreich exerted a profound influence, which went far beyond his scientific opinions and his many useful papers. S. L. WASHBURN [See also EVOLUTION, article on HUMAN EVOLUTION; PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY.] WORKS BY WEIDENREICH 1904
Zur Kinnbildung beim Menschen. Anatomischer Anzeiger 25:314-319. 1913 Uber das Hiiftbein und das Becken der Primaten und ihre Umformung durch den aufrechten Gang. Anatomischer Anzeiger 44:397-513. 1928 Der Schddelfund von Weimar-Ehringsdorf. Jena (Germany): Fischer. 1936a The Mandibles of Sinanthropus pekinensis: A Comparative Study. Palaeontologica sinica Series D 7, fasc. 3. 1936b Observations on the Form and Proportions of the Endocranial Casts of Sinanthropus pekinensis, Other Hominids and Great Apes: A Comparative Study of Brain Size. Palaeontologica sinica Series D 7, fasc. 4. 1937 The Dentition of Sinanthropus pekinensis: A Comparative Odontography of the Hominids. Palaeontologica sinica New Series D no. 1, whole series no. 101. 1941 The Extremity Bones of Sinanthropus pekinensis. Palaeontologica sinica New Series D no. 5; whole series no. 116. 1943 The Skull of Sinanthropus pekinensis: A Comparative Study on a Primitive Hominid Skull. Palaeontologica sinica New Series D no. 10; whole series no. 127. 1945a Giant Early Man From Java and South China. Volume 40, part 1 in American Museum of Natural History, Anthropological Papers. New York: The Museum. 1945b The Brachycephalization of Recent Mankind. Southwest Journal of Anthropology 1:1-54. 1946 Apes, Giants and Man, Univ. of Chicago Press. 1947a The Trend of Human Evolution. Evolution 1:221236. 1947fa Facts and Speculations Concerning the Origin of Homo sapiens. American Anthropologist New Series 49:187-203. The Shorter Anthropological Papers of Franz Weidenreich Published in the Period 1939-1948: A Memorial Volume. Compiled by S. L. Washburn and Davida Wolff son. New York: Viking Fund, 1949.
WELFARE See PHILANTHROPY; PLANNING, SOCIAL, article On WELFARE PLANNING; SOCIAL WORK; WELFARE
STATE; and the articles listed under SECURITY.
SOCIAL
504
WELFARE ECONOMICS WELFARE ECONOMICS
Welfare economics is that branch of economics which concerns itself with the principles by which alternative economic arrangements may be ranked in terms of social welfare. Although commonly regarded as a normative study, preliminary propositions of welfare economics that have reference to the welfare of the individual only need not be normative. If, for instance, welfare is used as a synonym for happiness, the statement that a person's welfare increases with an increase in his range of choice becomes a judgment of fact rather than of value. However, unless the welfare of each person in a community were increased, a value judgment about the distribution of welfare would be necessary to any conclusion that the welfare of the community as a whole, or social welfare, had increased. One might try to avoid all value judgments by denning some measurable magnitude as an index of social welfare. It might then seem possible to regard welfare economics as a positive study concerned with testing hypotheses about the factors that influence this chosen index. But unless the criteria of social welfare implied by the definition, particularly the distributional aspect, command broad assent, the results of this arbitrary procedure will have limited interest. History. Until the turn of the present century it was not customary to draw a sharp distinction between positive or descriptive economics, on the one hand, and welfare or prescriptive economics, on the other. Indeed, economic doctrine was such that statements of economic policy were hard to separate from propositions of pure theory, policy often seeming to follow ineluctably from theory. With the publication of Pigou's Wealth and Welfare in 1912 (revised as The Economics of Welfare in 1920), it became generally realized that welfare economics could be usefully developed as a separate study and regarded as a body of principles to which policy decisions might usefully be referred. However, one thing remained to be made explicit: no policy propositions whatsoever could be deduced from the axioms of economic theory. This task was admirably discharged in Lionel Robbins' classic Nature and Significance of Economic Science (1932). Although the distinction between positive and normative economics is now commonplace among the academic fraternity, and the text for a sermon to all first-year students, it has to be admitted that much of the writing in popular financial journals and in the reports of government and international bodies continues to convey the im-
pression that policy proposals flow inevitably from well-worn economic principles. Several of the key concepts in welfare economics were elucidated in the nineteenth century. The concept of consumer's surplus, for instance, was used by Dupuit (1844), a French engineer, to justify the building of bridges in those cases where even the maximum revenue derivable from the sale of their services fell short of their current costs. In the first edition of his Principles of Economics (1890), Alfred Marshall, father of the Cambridge school of economists, defined consumer's surplus as "the excess of the price which he would be willing to pay rather than go without the thing, over that which he actually does pay." Assuming the marginal utility of money to be unchanged for small price variations, he attempted to justify what was in effect Dupuit's method of measuring this surplus as the area under the demand curve and above the price line. This concept and the analogous concept of economic rent are useful tools in partial equilibrium analysis, in which prices in all markets, other than those immediately under survey, are taken as remaining constant. [See CONSUMER'S SURPLUS; RENT.] The progenitor of general equilibrium analysis, Leon Walras, introduced the idea of a position of maximum welfare for society, a position he identified with the market solution of a purely competitive economy (1874-1877). However, the concept was more successfully established before the turn of the century by Vilfredo Pareto (1896-1897). Having discarded marginal utility in favor of the notion of ordered preference fields for individuals, Pareto was able to define a social optimum as a position from which no change could be made that would make everybody better off. A few years later Enrico Barone (1908), in an article entitled "The Ministry of Production in the Collectivist State," used some fairly simple mathematics in exploiting the implications of such an optimal position. However, the neatest demonstration of the implications of an optimal welfare position for society remained to be given by Abram Bergson (1938). By maximizing a welfare function for society containing all the relevant economic variables subject to the constraints of techniques and resources, most of the first-order conditions for a maximum, familiar to economists as the marginal equalities, were seen to be common to various schools of thought which differed mainly on the question of an ideal distribution of welfare. The "New Welfare Economics" and the old. The so-called New Welfare Economics is dated,
WELFARE ECONOMICS somewhat arbitrarily, from the appearance of a short note by Nicholas Kaldor (1939) in response to a paper by Roy Harrod (1938). Using as an illustration the repeal of the Corn Laws in Britain in 1846, Harrod argued that the gain to the community as a whole might be said to exceed the losses to the landlords only if all the people affected were treated as equal in some sense, a view held to be unwarranted by Robbins. Kaldor, however, denied the relevance of interpersonal comparisons of utility to the problem by attributing to the classical economists a more "objective" test of economic efficiency: a new economic arrangement is an improvement if the losers thereby could be more than compensated by the gainers. Whether compensation should be paid in any instance was a political question on which the economist had no special authority to pronounce. This test, or principle of hypothetical compensation (sometimes abbreviated to principle, or test, of compensation), was hailed by John Hicks (1939a) as a more suitable foundation for welfare economics than was the utility foundation provided by Marshall and at the time associated with the Cambridge school—in particular with the welfare economics of Pigou. Allocative problems had frequently been expressed in value terms: the attainment of an "ideal" output—an optimum position, in effect, requiring that for any class of factor the value of marginal products be the same in all lines of employment. Yet it was generally believed that one could not proceed to improve allocation with a clear conscience unless the marginal utility of money was in fact the same for everyone concerned. For so long as differences in the marginal utility of money existed between people, the redistribution of income associated with any reallocation might well result, on balance, in a reduction of total utility. With the Kaldor-Hicks test, however, this precondition was regarded as superfluous: one could proceed without inhibition to recommend as allocative improvements all changes which met the compensation test, leaving distribution as a separate consideration. Although 1939 is a useful watershed in welfare economics, the perspective allowed by the passage of time since then reveals the New Welfare Economics to be less of a novelty and more of an adaptation of the existing Pareto approach as developed by Barone and Bergson, among others. On the one hand, it obviously involved a shift from cardinal utility to ordinal utility, or to preference fields in general—although the habit of expressing welfare propositions in utility terms has lingered into the
505
present. On the other hand, the New Welfare Economics appears as a straightforward extension— to some extent anticipated by Pigou (1920) and Hotelling (1938)—of Pareto's definition of an optimum position (1896-1897) to nonoptimal positions generally. If an optimum was defined as a position from which no movement could make everybody better off, nonoptimal positions could be ranked on a similar principle: thus a movement from one nonoptimal position, i, to a better, or "more efficient," nonoptimal position, n, could be defined as a movement which could make everyone better off than he was in the I position—in effect, a statement that gainers could overcompensate losers in the movement to n. And one should be reminded in passing that a requirement that everyone in fact be made better off in the change from i to n—which is sometimes referred to as "the principle of compensated adjustment" and which, although cautious, might appear an inoffensive rule of procedure— was explicitly repudiated by Kaldor, for whom this sort of hypothetical compensation was in itself a test of economic efficiency divorced from distributional considerations. Several of the criticisms of the Kaldor-Hicks test serve to highlight some of its logical and ethical implications. Tibor Scitovsky (1941) has pointed out that a new batch of goods, n, might by this test be shown to be more efficient than an existing batch, i, notwithstanding that if the n batch were adopted, application of the same test would sanction a return to i. The key to this paradox is to be found in the interconnection between any distribution of a given batch of goods and the corresponding common set of relative prices. The Kaldor-Hicks test is rather like comparing the aggregate values of the two batches of goods, using as relative prices those generated by the existing distribution of the i batch. Scitovsky's proposed reversal test, on the other hand, is akin to comparing their aggregate values with the prices resulting from the n distribution. And it is a well-known index-number phenomenon that certain changes in the weights—prices, in this instance—attributed to the magnitudes in alternative situations might alter the ranking of the two indices. In any event, the Scitovsky criterion for an economic improvement required, as one should expect, not only that in a movement to n gainers be able to overcompensate losers but that, in addition, gainers in a return to i should not be able to compensate losers. It might be thought that the compensation principle is such as to sanction blackmail, since anyone contemplating socially damaging behavior ought,
506
WELFARE ECONOMICS
on this principle, to be dissuaded by adequate compensation. In fact, since hypothetical compensation is the criterion, a movement to the new position of no social damage is countenanced only because the losers (those who agree to refrain from mischief) may be more than compensated by the gainers (the rest of society). It is not required, however, as Kaldor emphasized, that the losers actually be compensated. Indeed, this objection, voiced by George Stigler (1943), might more legitimately be urged against the principle of compensated adjustment, which does require of the efficiency test that everyone actually be made better off. According to this principle, all existing, or even potential, criminals ought to be pensioned off by society. Nonetheless, as understood today, the compensation principle, actual or hypothetical, is not a universal principle but one applicable in cases in which the law, as the expression of public opinion, is neutral as between contending interests. Obviously this is not always , so. If, for example, it were universally held that all \ men had a right to peace and quiet, a small airline company would be legally prevented from disturbing the quiet of a wealthy residential area even though, in the absence of legal restraint, the rich could have improved their situation by compensating the airline for the losses it would sustain by abandoning the route in question. A more telling objection to the compensation tests as criteria of economic efficiency was voiced by Radomysler (1946): that their constant application might conceivably act to reduce the purchasing power of the poorer sections of the community. This consideration was uppermost in Little's mind when he argued (1950) against the adoption of tests of hypothetical compensation as definitions of an increase in real income, in welfare, or in economic efficiency. He proposed to use such tests only as one part of a dual criterion which would require that an approved economic change also realize a satisfactory distribution of welfare. Present theoretical approaches It is less accurate to speak of different schools of welfare economics than of different approaches which, were they all realizable in practice, would tend to the same solution. We can divide the present theoretical literature into three broad streams. Optimality of resource allocation. The traditional interest in rules of resource allocation, itself closely associated with the development of the theory of value since 1870, is still foremost in the theoretical literature. It has resulted in continued emphasis on those rules regarded as necessary con-
ditions for an optimal position, the simplest rule being in fact the most comprehensive in requiring that resources be so distributed that—granted complete divisibility—the marginal products of each factor class are the same in alternative uses. (If this condition is not met, there must be room for improvement: If, for example, the marginal value of labor's product in good X is $2 but is $3 in good Y, then, provided always that the marginal product of labor was diminishing in X and Y, continued increments in total value are created by switching labor from the production of X to that of Y until its marginal value in each is the same.) We can usefully break this over-all condition down into those preliminary conditions most frequently used in examining popular welfare propositions by expressing the value of the marginal product for factor A in all lines of product as (1)
lx
dX dA
dY
Similarly, for factor B, (2)
dX * dB
?
dY dB
(where X and Y are goods, px and py their respective prices, and A and B factor units; px(dX/dA) is, therefore, the price of the good X times the marginal physical product of factor A in terms of X; that is, the value of A's marginal product). From equations (1) and (2) three sets of optimal conditions are derived without difficulty. Exchange optimum requires that the product rate of substitution be the same for each person. This condition is met by having a common set of goods prices, p x , p y , — - , to which each person adjusts by setting equal to it the ratio of his marginal utilities of X, Y, • • • , or, what comes to the same thing, his goods rate of substitution. Thus, for each person: dU dU _ dY\_ px dXJ py dX ' dY
All conceivable distributions of a given batch of goods meeting this exchange optimum condition trace out a locus known as the contract curve. Production optimum, which requires that the ratio of marginal physical products of pairs of factors be the same for all goods or, put another way, that the factor rate of substitution be the same for all goods, is derived simply by dividing equation (1) by (2). Thus, dX dX_=dY_ dY dA '' dB dA '' dB
'"'
WELFARE ECONOMICS
507
or OB . v dB . m X = -^-T- invY,
dA dA and so on. This condition is met along a boundary containing all combinations of goods producible with a given factor endowment. Top level optimum builds on the two preceding optimal conditions and requires that the product rate of substitution in consumption (the same for each person) be equal to the product rate of substitution in production. It is obtained by dividing (1) by py(dX/dA) and (2) by p y (dX/<9B), which gives dY <9Y Pv
dA dX dA
dB dX dB
dX
The price ratio on the left-hand side faces each individual and results in a common rate of substitution OY/dX, this being equal to the technical rate of transformation (or product rate of substitution) dY/dX on the right-hand side. This condition is fulfilled by any tangency between the production possibility boundary and a community indifference surface; in the construction of the latter the exchange optimum condition is always met. The allocative rule, or optimum conditions, has frequently been employed in the attempt to establish (among other things) general propositions concerning the welfare superiority of perfect competition or "equiproportional" imperfect competition (in which the ratio of price to marginal cost is the same in the production of all goods and services) over other forms of market organization, the welfare superiority of poll taxes over other forms of taxation, of free trade over no foreign trade. It is also used for deriving the conditions necessary to the achievement of optimal tariffs by a country which is immune from tariff retaliation but can sell more abroad only by lowering its price and can buy more only by paying a higher foreign price. The conditions can easily be reached by a little algebraic manipulation guided by the idea of maximizing a country's net benefit from foreign trade, although they are illustrated most simply in the two-goods, two-country model represented in Figure 1. The curve OB is country B's offer curve and traces the amounts of Y it is willing to export in exchange for X imports. Similarly, OG is country G's offer curve and indicates the amounts of X it is willing to supply against its imports of Y. The free trade equilibrium is at D, at which terms of trade, OD, country G's imports of Y, or OY, is equal to B's
Figure 1
exports of Y, and G's exports of X, OX, is equal to B's imports of X. Under free trade, country B enjoys a level of welfare indicated by the social indifference curve Is passing through D. Any tariff on the imports of X reduces the amount purchased by citizens of B at the existing terms of trade and, indeed, at any conceivable terms of trade. Any given tariff, in effect, contracts B's offer curve. The optimal tariff is chosen to generate an offer curve OB' that will intersect OG at D', this being the point at which B's social indifference curve l'g is tangent to OG. The conditions are now readily stated: the rate of transformation of X for Y through international trade (the slope of G's offer curve at D') equals B's subjective rate of substitution (the slope of B's social indifference curve, I',, at D'), which, given perfect competition in B, is also equal to B's domestic rate of transformation (since everywhere in B prices are equal to domestic marginal costs). Finally, it should be noticed that an optimal position requires the simultaneous fulfillment of the optimal conditions, which are deemed realized under perfect competition insofar as price is equal to marginal cost in every activity. If, owing to some constraint in the economy, this condition is not met in some sectors, the best that can be done in the circumstances may not be to have price equal to marginal cost in all the unconstrained sectors. In very simple cases there may be simple adaptations of the rules. If there were only one constrained sector, which sold at a price 30 per cent, say, above marginal cost, the best thing to do would be to adopt a 30 per cent rule in the rest of the economy. In other cases there may not even be a best solution, or if there is one in principle, collecting the information required to determine it would be too vast an enterprise to be seriously considered. If the number of constrained sectors were few and their
508
WELFARE ECONOMICS
aggregate product small in relation to that of the total economy, much the best thing would be to ignore these few and impose a marginal cost pricing rule on the others, with the assurance that, though obviously not meeting the conditions for an optimum, the economy as a whole would not be far from an optimal position. Consumers surplus. The notion of economic rent as the surplus accruing to a resource owner, dating from Ricardo, and the parallel notion of consumer's surplus enjoyed by a purchaser of finished goods are common in rough computational estimates of net benefits in specific projects, although they are less popular in the investigation of general welfare propositions. The consumer's surplus concept was easily purged of its utility content by Hicks (1939b) and further elaborated in a series of papers in the next few years. The crucial income effect discovered by Slutsky (1915), and independently by Hicks and Allen (1934), was central in drawing a distinction between the compensating variation and the equivalent variation of a price change. The compensating variation may be defined as the compensation which would make an individual as well off as he was before the change if he is constrained to accept the change. If, for example, the price of oranges fell from six cents to four cents each, the compensating variation would be measured by the maximum sum per period the individual would be prepared to pay for a license enabling him to buy all the oranges he wished at the new price of four cents rather than be constrained to pay six cents. If, on the other hand, the price of oranges rose from six cents to nine cents, the compensating variation could be measured by the minimum sum per period he would accept in exchange for an agreement from him to buy at nine cents instead of six cents. The equivalent variation of a price change is definable as the compensation which makes a person as well off as he would be after the change if he were constrained to forgo the change. Thus, if oranges fall from six cents to four cents the equivalent variation would be measured by the minimum sum the individual would accept in order to forgo buying at the new price. If oranges rose from six cents to nine cents, the equivalent variation would be measured by the maximum sum he would be willing to pay in order to have the privilege of buying at the old price of six cents. It follows from these definitions, and can be made apparent on an indifference diagram, that the compensating variation for a fall in price from, say, six cents to four cents is identical with the equivalent variation of a rise
in price from four cents to six cents, the symmetry holding for the other possibility. Market data. In this broad stream of development we can conveniently place the investigations into the appropriateness of market data in applying the optimal rules: how far does marginal cost in industry reflect the "true" cost to society, or the market price of a good its true marginal valuation to society? The pioneering work in directing attention to this enormously important problem was Pigou's Economics of Welfare (1920). Even if the market were perfectly competitive, with outputs such that price everywhere equaled marginal cost, the resulting allocation might be far from optimal as a result of divergencies between what Pigou called marginal social net benefits of any factor class in different occupations. Today it is more common to talk of external economies and diseconomies, or of external or neighborhood effects. [See EXTERNAL ECONOMIES AND DISECONOMIES.] Broadly speaking, such effects arise whenever a relevant variable in the economy is unpriced or inadequately priced. A familiar example chosen from Pigou's great work is that of smoke from a factory chimney, which imposes costs on the inhabitants but which, in the absence of effective antismoke legislation, the factory owners do not include in their cost of production. Were they obliged to install antismoke devices, or to compensate for the damage inflicted on the neighboring inhabitants—or, in the event of inhabitants organizing in order to compensate the factory owners for reducing output, to reckon as costs all offers of compensation they will forgo by continuing production—these additional costs of production would generally be expected to curtail output. The theoretical discussion of the diversity and implications for welfare of these external effects has been growing with the years, along with skepticism about the virtues of the competitive market as an allocating mechanism. Even such relatively unmeasurable effects as the response of a person's welfare to changes in the welfare of other people or to changes in their patterns of expenditure— the so-called demonstration effect, sometimes facetiously referred to as the Joneses' effect—has been the source of considerable theoretical speculation, in particular by Baumol (1952), Duesenberry (1949), and Graaff (1957). The concepts mentioned in this approach to welfare economics are shaped for use in the applied part of the subject known as cost-benefit analysis, which is gradually superseding ordinary commercial and accounting procedures in determining
WELFARE ECONOMICS whether or not to undertake large-scale investments with public funds. Optimality of distribution. In the preceding category we discussed the literature on optimal conditions. We must remind ourselves that there is an indefinite number of such optimal positions open to society, each differing, among other things, in the pattern of distribution. We place in this category the approach of those who seek a conceptual solution to this problem, although one at a. high level of abstraction. U
V
o
•17, Figure 2
A simple representation of what is being sought may be illustrated by a Samuelson "utility possibility curve," drawn as VV for a two-person community in Figure 2. The level of total utility of individual A is measured, on any scale, along the UA axis, that of individual B along the UJ} axis. The VV curve may here represent a boundary of points attainable with a given endowment of resources. Therefore, any point such as p is a combination of Ob utility for B and Oa utility for A. Point p, being on the boundary, is by definition a Pareto optimum, and in this figure it differs, in respect of distribution, from any other optimal position along the VV boundary. In order to determine formally which of these boundary points is best, the optimum optimorum, as it is sometimes called, we impose on the boundary a simple representation of the social welfare function introduced by Bergson (1938). In a manner analogous to the individual's indifference map, which orders all combinations of goods, the community may be deemed to
509
rank all combinations of A's and B's welfares. W-i, Wa, and W3 indicate successively higher curves of a given social welfare, although along any one of such curves all combinations of the welfares of A and B are of equal social value. Clearly, q on Wo at a point tangent to the VV boundary indicates the position of the highest social value attainable with the given resources. But on what principle can we construct these W curves? It must be admitted that they are very nebulous things, and if we had some notion of the boundary VV, at least for certain ranges, the choice of some point q would perforce be a political decision. A far more ambitious, and more abstract, approach begins with the notion of each person in the community having his own ideas of a complete welfare ordering of all opportunities or "social states" open to the community, each such social state including some distribution of all goods and services among the members of the community and some assortment of collective goods and other things which use up scarce resources. A liberal society would require that the social welfare function should be derived in some way from these individual constructions, and from them only. What rules will enable us to generate a "satisfactory" welfare function for society from the variety of individual blueprints? In fact, Kenneth Arrow demonstrated (1951) that if certain "reasonable" conditions are to be met—in particular, that the social welfare function should not be imposed either by custom or by dictatorship, that it be positively associated with the orderings of each of the individuals, and that the removal of any possible economic arrangement be not allowed to disturb the order of the remaining possible arrangements in the social welfare function—no such rules can be found. Although this result excited a good deal of controversy at the time, its bearing on the other aspects of welfare economics has not been very marked. The Little approach. The problems of distribution and allocation, however, have been approached in a far less abstract form and, indeed, have been divorced from the notion of optimality by some further development of the New Welfare Economics. Little and others turned to a more cautious and partial approach, seeking to establish sufficient criteria based on widely accepted value judgments to enable the community to choose between alternative economic arrangements. The criterion proposed in Little's A Critique of Welfare Economics (1950) regarded a position n as superior to I if (a) a test of hypothetical compensation showed n
51 0
WELFARE ECONOMICS
to be superior whether the test is based on the i distribution or on the n distribution and (fr) the n distribution is held to be at least as good as the I distribution. There has been intense controversy recently in the pages of the Economic Journal (Robertson et al. 1962) on the meaning of the alternatives i and n, about what is held constant under procedures purporting to entail hypothetical compensation, about the meaning of a better distribution, and about the consistency and transitivity of the two parts of the dual criterion. Agreement has not yet been reached, although it has been suggested that Little's criterion, when amended to remove the possibility of yielding contradictory results, can be reduced to the rather austere proposition that a movement to a new position is justified if the distribution is made better and not everyone is made worse off. However, this is only a conceivable result and comes from considering the worst that might happen. Its application to practical problems might reveal that it was more usual to find a better distribution and most people made better off. Some weaknesses in welfare economics. Other than welfare criteria and the constructions used in their representation, the theoretical scaffolding used in constructing welfare propositions is much the same as that used in positive economic theory. In consequence, many of the simplifications used in positive theory have been adopted as a matter of course. The movement of goods and factors is usually treated as costless except, of course, for problems in which transport costs are the central issue. Tastes are taken to remain unchanged, and all relevant information is supposed to be available without cost. Again, since almost all welfare theorizing is conducted within a framework of comparative statics, the time taken, and the costs involved, in adjusting from one economic arrangement to another is left out of the formal analysis. Such simplifications as these may be more readily admitted into the axiomatic structure of positive theory, where their appropriateness is, in the last resort, determined by reference to the predictive performance of the relevant hypotheses. In welfare economics, by contrast, the degree of truth or falsehood of these simplifications is directly pertinent in deciding whether or not the welfare criteria in question have been met or whether an optimal position is reached by adopting certain economic measures. For we cannot legitimately talk of a movement to a better, or to a best, position unless all the costs associated with the act of moving have been allowed for. We are therefore justified in looking more closely at these simplifications.
Taste. As for constancy of tastes, which— despite some foredoomed attempts to make provision for possible changes—is the sine qua non of all welfare propositions, there are considerable difficulties of interpretation to contend with. It may be urged that inasmuch as a person's pattern of choice is influenced by season, climate, age, environment, and other distinguishable circumstances, no formal change in that pattern need be recognized: such influences enter into his preference function in much the same way that prices and income do. An autonomous change of this preference function may, on the other hand, arise in response to some novel experience, including persuasion and new information. If the period of time over which a given economic arrangement continued to exist were long enough, and people had the foresight to make allowance for those changes in their choice patterns which inevitably arise from seasonal fluctuations and the passage of time, welfare economics could afford to ignore the autonomous changes in taste. But if instead the autonomous changes are rapid and conspicuous relative to the time required to move to a better economic position, especially in cases where the tastes that are changing are of immediate relevance to the contemplated alternative arrangements, little benefit can be expected to society from the study of welfare economics. Information. The increasing variety and complexity of modern goods, both finished and intermediate, is acting to increase the costs of assembling and distributing the information among those who can make use of it. Whether, and how far, to extend the existing information services is obviously an applied problem in welfare economics that in itself calls for a vast amount of statistics in the endeavor to meet the condition that the dissemination of information be expanded to the point at which marginal benefit equals marginal cost. Moreover, information about the future, whether it be about the weather, patterns of demand, sources of supply, or technological innovation, would be to some extent uncertain, no matter what resources were devoted to forecasting. There has been much informal discussion, by those in broad agreement about the meaning and desirability of a good allocation of resources, concerning the advantages or disadvantages of more centralization of planning decisions in adjusting the economy to continually changing optimal positions. Most of this literature —works of Hayek (1944), Friedman (1962), and Dobb (1924-1954) come to mind—is of a reflective nature, drawing heavily on historical interpretation and inspired by strong political conviction.
WELFARE ECONOMICS Uncertainty. Uncertainty is almost always discussed in connection with entrepreneurs' decisions to invest in one thing or another, yet this sort of uncertainty, much of which can be reduced by better information and, perhaps, by a reduction in competitive advertising, is of negligible importance for welfare economics, compared with the inability of the consumer to foresee the longer-term consequences of introducing goods which, in the absence of such foresight, would be sanctioned under any welfare criteria. Many years are required for significant and manifest external diseconomies to be experienced by society, and by then vast material interests are entrenched and all the circumstances of daily living are so conditioned as to make drastic change politically difficult. Mechanized transport, for instance, speeds the pace of travel and initially saves time. What could hardly be foreseen is that the greater facility would be more than offset by the rapid increase of daily distances, so that in the second half of the twentieth century people spend a far larger portion of their lives traveling to and from work than at any other period in history, and have come to accept the more blatant external diseconomies—foul air, unabating engine noise, loss of life and limb—as inevitable features of modern life. Indeed, we might conjecture that the more important consequences of the introduction of new goods, chiefly durables, are likely to be the least measurable. The effects of television on emotional well-being—indeed, the effects of increasing mechanization in isolating men from one another—are beginning to be realized, though more in the field of fiction and biography than in sociological studies. The economist who tried to bring them to bear on the welfare calculus would be regarded as eccentric. For these and other reasons it would be optimistic to expect that continued study in welfare economics will contribute toward making the world a happier place. The way in which we live—the material environment and social institutions, and above all, the relation between man and his fellows upon which happiness ultimately depends—has become largely a by-product of technological innovation wherever it advances. Nevertheless, appreciation of the methods of welfare economics can do much to mitigate some of the more blatant ills of the affluent society by combating conservative presumption in favor of commercial criteria and by revealing manifest injustices in any price system that has not been corrected to make allowance for visible and widespread external diseconomies. E. J. MISHAN
51 1
[See also CONSUMER SOVEREIGNTY; ECONOMIC EQUILIBRIUM; EXTERNAL ECONOMIES AND DISECONOMIES; GAME THEORY; PUBLIC EXPENDITURES; UTILITY; and the biographies of BARONE; DUPUIT; MARSHALL; PARETO; PIGOU; WALRAS.] BIBLIOGRAPHY ARROW, KENNETH J. 1951 Social Choice and Individual Values. New York: Wiley. BARONE, ENRICO (1908) 1935 The Ministry of Production in the Collectivist State. Pages 245-290 in Friedrich A. von Hayek (editor), Collectivist Economic Planning: Critical Studies on the Possibilities of Socialism by N. G. Pierson, Ludwig von Mises, Georg Hahn, and Enrico Barone. London: Routledge. -» First published as "II ministro della produzione nello stato collettivista." BAUMOL, WILLIAM J. 1952 Welfare Economics and the Theory of the State. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. BERGSON, ABRAM 1938 A Reformulation of Certain Aspects of Welfare Economics [by Abram Burk]. Quarterly Journal of Economics 52:310-334. DOBB, MAURICE (1924-1954) 1955 On Economic Theory and Socialism: Collected Papers. New York: International Publishers. DUESENBERRY, JAMES S. 1949 Income, Saving and the Theory of Consumer Behavior. Harvard Economic Studies, Vol. 87. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. DUPUIT, JULES (1844) 1952 On the Measurement of the Utility of Public Works. International Economic Papers 2:83-110. -» First published in French. Mainly of historical interest. FRIEDMAN, MILTON 1962 Capitalism and Freedom. Univ. of Chicago Press. GRAAFF, J. DE V. 1957 Theoretical Welfare Economics. Cambridge Univ. Press. HARROD, R. F. 1938 Scope and Method of Economics. Economic Journal 48:383-412. HAYEK, FRIEDRICH A. VON 1944 The Road to Serfdom. London: Routledge; Univ. of Chicago Press. HICKS, J. R. 1939a The Foundations of Welfare Economics. Economic Journal 49:696—712. HICKS, J. R. (1939fa) 1946 Value and Capital: An Inquiry Into Some Fundamental Principles of Economic Theory. 2d ed. Oxford: Clarendon. HICKS, J. R.; and ALLEN, R. G. D. 1934 A Reconsideration of the Theory of Value. Economica New Series 1:52-76. HOTELLING, HAROLD 1938 The General Welfare in Relation to Problems of Taxation and of Railway and Utility Rates. Econometrica 6:242-269. KALDOR, NICHOLAS 1939 Welfare Propositions of Economics and Inter-personal Comparisons of Utility. Economic Journal 49:549-552. LITTLE, I. M. D. (1950) 1957 A Critique of Welfare Economics. 2d ed. Oxford: Clarendon. MARSHALL, ALFRED (1890) 1961 Principles of Economics. 9th ed. 2 vols. New York and London: Macmillan. H> A variorum edition. The 8th edition is preferable for normal use. MISHAN, E. J. 1957 A Re-appraisal of the Principles of Resource Allocation. Economica New Series 24:324342. MISHAN, E. J. 1967 The Costs of Economic Growth. London: Staples.
51 2
WELFARE STATE
PARETO, VILFREDO (1896-1897) 1964 Cours d'economie politique. New ed. Oeuvres completes, Vol. 1. Geneva: Droz. -» Mainly of historical interest. PIGOU, A. C. (1920) 1960 The Economics of Welfare. 4th ed. London: Macmillan. RADOMYSLER, A. 1946 Welfare Economics and Economic Policy. Economica New Series 13:190-204. REDER, MELVIN W. 1947 Studies in the Theory of Welfare Economics. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. ROBBINS, LIONEL (1932) 1937 An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science. 2d ed., rev. & enl. London: Macmillan. ROBERTSON, D. H. et al. 1962 Welfare Criteria: An Exchange of Notes. Economic Journal 72:226-244. SAMUELSON, PAUL A. (1947) 1958 Foundations of Economic Analysis. Harvard Economic Studies, Vol. 80. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. SCITOVSKY, TIBOR 1941 A Note on Welfare Propositions in Economics. Review of Economic Studies 9:77-88. SLUTSKY, EUGEN 1915 Sulla teoria del bilancio del consumatore. Giornale degli economisti 3d series 51:1—26. -» Mainly of historical interest. STIGLER, GEORGE J. 1943 Communications: The New Welfare Economics. American Economic Review 33: 355-359. WALRAS, LEON (1874-1877) 1954 Elements of Pure Economics: Or, the Theory of Social Wealth. Translated by William Jaffe. Homewood, 111.: Irwin; London: Allen & Unwin. -> First published as Elements d'economie politique pure. Mainly of historical interest.
WELFARE STATE The welfare state is the institutional outcome of the assumption by a society of legal and therefore formal and explicit responsibility for the basic wellbeing of all of its members. Such a state emerges when a society or its decision-making groups become convinced that the welfare of the individual (beyond such provisions as may be made "to preserve order and provide for the common defense") is too important to be left to custom or to informal arrangements and private understandings and is therefore a concern of government. In a complex society such assistance may be given to the individual directly or, just as often, to the economic interest most immediately affecting his welfare. The rubric is a relatively recent one not to be found in the traditional political lexicons, so that the point at which a state, in expanding social services to its citizens, earns this label is imprecise and controversial. The terms "basic security" or "wellbeing" have been and will be construed variously, and the interpretation of welfare is in flux—especially in the United States. In short, an account of the welfare state must struggle with a large legacy of ambiguity. Every society, preliterate no less than literate, makes some provision for those of its members who
find themselves in distress. In the case of aborigines such provision is almost exclusively assumed by so-called primary groups: the family or other kinship groups, or neighbors rallying spontaneously to aid the victims of calamity. Among primitive peoples, aid to the needy may be a by-product of other institutional arrangements, but it is often related to well-defined ideals of generosity and charity. Thus, among the Eskimos, although the hunter enjoys an absolute right to the game he kills, it is taken for granted that he will share it with his needy neighbors. Among the Australian aborigines, on the other hand, sharing the quarry is not left to the discretion of the hunter but is governed by rigid kinship rules which give elder relatives an inviolable claim to a portion of the kill. In a study of the east African Baganda, John Roscoe said that "no one ever went hungry . . . because everyone was welcome to share a meal with his equals," and he observed, possibly with some exaggeration, that among nonliterate peoples existing on the subsistence margin "it is generally the rule that when there is not enough, all hunger alike; when there is plenty, all participate" (quoted in Herskovits [1940] 1952, p. 31). As society becomes more complex, responsibility for helping the distressed may be assumed by the ruling authority, if only as when the government of Rome pacified the rabble with "bread and circuses," or by ecclesiastical agencies, as in the case of the Roman Catholic church during the Middle Ages, or by guilds, fraternities, and similar associations. For many centuries, the church in Europe, heeding the words of Jesus and the earlier words of Amos in praise of charity and kindness to the poor, assumed a major responsibility for the relief of human suffering. It established hospitals, orphanages, and (to a lesser extent) poorhouses, sometimes made outright gifts and loans, and even sheltered travelers. The work of such orders as the Alexian Brothers, who buried the poor, the Order of St. Lazarus, whose members cared for lepers, and the Knights Hospitalers, who supervised hospitals, was typical. In England, the dispossession of the monasteries and the breakup of the manors forced the state to assume the burden. Thus, a law of 1572 provided for collectors and overseers to compel heretofore voluntary payments for poor relief. Subsequently, the famous Elizabethan "Old Poor Law" of 1601 definitely accepted the principle of state responsibility for care of the needy, frugal though the provision may have been. Also, it levied a specific tax for poor relief and established categories of need. Even so, throughout this period the real burden of responsibility continued to fall on
WELFARE STATE the family and the village community until the industrial revolution and the developments associated with it drastically transformed the prevailing pattern throughout Europe and America. England in the last decades of the eighteenth and the start of the nineteenth century provides the classic example. The industrial revolution Industrialization and the shift of population from the countryside to the city, hastened in England by the enclosure acts, greatly weakened primary groups. Many functions such as food preparation, recreation, and education, once exclusively performed by the family, were increasingly taken over in industrialized urban areas by other agencies. Today, in the city, almost everything used by the family is made outside the home. It has become increasingly difficult for elders and children to contribute to the support of the family group, as was the case in a rural agrarian society. At the same time the growth of a secular outlook has undermined traditional notions governing separation and divorce and has resulted in the breakup of an increasingly larger proportion of marriages. Accordingly, the enduring patriarchal family of tradition, often embracing three generations and assorted collateral kin, has become a two- and more often a single-generation group, when it has not broken up altogether. During the very period when the number of aged has rapidly multiplied, the family has become less and less available for their maintenance, not to mention the problem of care of the handicapped and of the casualties of broken homes. Meanwhile, the same period that has witnessed a declining role for the family has also seen the increased mobility and impersonality of city life loosening the once-close ties binding neighbors together. Quite apart from its impact on primary groups and their role in providing for those handicapped by old age or other physical disability, the industrial revolution brought into new prominence the class of so-called "able-bodied poor." Whether in the Soviet Union and Communist China today or in England and America in the nineteenth century, capital accumulation on a scale necessary to generate rapid and continuing industrialization can be achieved only at the expense of the level of living of the average worker-consumer. If workerconsumers are incapable of effective resistance, either politically through the exercise of meaningful suffrage or economically through strong labor unions, the sheer pace of industrialization is bound to produce widespread poverty. Such recourses
513
were not available in England or America in any realistic sense for much of the nineteenth century—hardly more than they are available today in the USSR and in China. To be sure, poverty among the "sturdy poor" was hardly strange to the Elizabethan, but the industrial revolution expanded their number and concentrated them in cities, where they were largely excluded from opportunities to supplement their income. At the same time the industrial system exacerbated the kind of dependency that results from enforced idleness. Quite apart from cyclical unemployment, the supply of labor in industrialized America and Europe, except during periods of war and war preparation, has generally exceeded the demand, thereby not only depressing the wages of those who work but also creating forced idleness and dependency. When to this and the "frictional" unemployment attendant on the operations of any complex economy has been added the mass unemployment generated by fluctuations of the business cycle (cyclical unemployment), the problem of care for the needy has taken on new and impressive dimensions. Unlike earlier societies in which distress was brought about by crop failures and other unavoidable disasters, or by chronic shortage of resources, distress was now caused by institutional arrangements that conspired to keep people from using their creative energies and conjoined depressed wages with a rising level of expectations. It was in such fertile soil that the welfare state germinated. However, rationalizations were promptly devised that condoned unemployment and poverty and argued against intervention by government. The unemployed were held to be lazy and shiftless, traits considered inborn and to be overcome only by the spur of need or the bribe of generous profits. The poor were improvident and unenterprising; poverty was a punishment for sloth and incompetence. Tampering with the verdict of the free market on the compensation that individuals receive by providing them with income when they are ill, or old, or unemployed would sabotage the only mechanism available for proportioning reward to merit. Truly productive and enterprising people would be penalized in order to provide for drones, and the inevitable outcome would be reduced productivity and less for all. If the syllogisms of economists failed to drive these points home, it was always possible to invoke the authority of theologians to show that poverty was a punishment for wickedness and wealth a reward for virtue and hence, as Max Weber has said, to provide "the comforting assurance that the unequal distribution
51 4
WELFARE STATE
of the goods of this world was a special dispensation of Divine Providence, which in these differences, as in particular grace, pursued secret ends unknown to men" ([1904-1905] 1930, p. 177). When to this was added the weight of Malthus and the new demography and, later, the teachings of social Darwinism, the case seemed overwhelming— at least to prosperous merchants and manufacturers—that the poor must be left to private charity if not to their own devices. Such views were expressed with varying degrees of eloquence by a large number of writers, from Daniel Defoe (Giving Alms No Charity, and Employing the Poor a Grievance to the Nation, 1704), Bernard Mandeville (Fable of the Bees: Or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, 1714), and Arthur Young (Farmer's Tour Through the East of England, 1771), through Spencer (1850) and Dicey (1905), down to Calvin Coolidge. Despite such misgivings, however, there was general agreement that public aid must be given. But it must be meager and it must be dispensed in a manner so humiliating to the recipient that, if able-bodied, he would accept work no matter how odious the conditions. And conditions in the nineteenth century, even after the passage of numerous factory acts, were indeed odious. For those unable to find employment, workhouses had been established in England as early as 1576, and these were retained, along with almshouses for the infirm and the practice of apprenticing and indenturing needy children, under the Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601. Such workhouses and almshouses, as Dickens' Oliver Twist reminds us, were grim beyond description, resembling jails more than havens of mercy. The severity of such provisions was slightly relaxed during a period when the English feared that French revolutionary ideas might leap the Channel, and in 1795 the socalled Speenhamland system actually provided for minimum subsistence by giving workers whose pay fell below a subsistence level an allowance from the public treasury with an added allowance for each child. But the "New Poor Law" of 1834, which sought to reduce the mounting outlay for poor relief and prevent the spread of pauperism, revived the old austerities. Its harsh philosophy, an outcome of the wedding of Benthamite utilitarianism and Manchester economics, dominated English and American policy until the twentieth century. Birth of the welfare state The philosophy of the welfare state is a wholly different one. Poverty and dependence are no longer regarded as evidence of personal failure. Quite apart from the physically disabled, workers who
are underpaid and unemployed or intermittently employed are considered to be impoverished through no fault of their own. Where the supply of labor nearly always exceeds the demand and opportunity is unevenly distributed, it is held that the free market fails in a vast number of cases to proportion reward to merit. As the wealth created by modern industry increases it is contended that there is enough to assure everyone, including the physically and mentally handicapped, of adequate support without unfairly penalizing or impairing the initiative of the talented and enterprising. An income large enough to provide the basic necessities of life in adequate measure is regarded as the right of every member of society. If anyone's income falls short, it should be supplemented not as an act of charity but as an act of social justice. It is conceded that shiftlessness and irresponsibility are common, but these are said to call, in great measure, for the approach of the physician who cures an illness and not the judge and jailer who punish a crime. Indeed, crime itself, like poverty, is regarded in the welfare state largely as a remediable outcome of personal and social disorganization rather than as an ineradicable manifestation of original sin. Finally, advocates of the welfare state contend that the price of widespread deprivation in an era of rising expectations is social instability on a scale unknown to preindustrial societies, where poverty was inescapable and therefore taken for granted; and they argue that such expectations can be frustrated, if at all, only by jettisoning democracy itself. Such is the general orientation of what has also been called the social service state. However, the welfare state was not transferred fully delineated from the blueprints of social architects to the soil of England, continental Europe, and the United States. Its career varies with each country. In England it was born of efforts to curb the abuses of the factory system and to improve penal institutions and outdoor relief. But efforts to humanize the factory system and to liberalize the provisions of the Poor Law of 1834 seemed increasingly like mere tinkering with particular grievances. A new age of humanitarianism was dawning, more sensitive to human suffering than its predecessors. Enfranchised and increasingly wellorganized workers clamored for substantive reform. Historic surveys such as Charles Booth's Life and Labour of the People in London (see Booth et al. 1889-1891) and B. S. Rowntree's Poverty: A Study of Town Life (1901) documented the presence of dire poverty on a vast scale in the "workshop of the world." Finally, in 1905, prodded by widespread
WELFARE STATE unemployment, Britain undertook a comprehensive examination of the administration of its poor laws. The Royal Commission on Poor Laws and Relief of Distress set up to make the investigation is famous for the report of its minority, led by Beatrice Webb. Among other things, this report proposed the abolition of Britain's archaic poor laws and the substitution of a comprehensive program of social insurance (Webb & Webb 1909). This recommendation, along with his own impression of the new German program of social insurance, contributed to David Lloyd George's historic decision to sponsor the program of unemployment and health insurance subsequently contained in the National Insurance Act of 1911. This legislation, prepared in large part by William H. Beveridge, chief architect of the welfare state in the English-speaking world, embarked Great Britain on the program which has since been expanded to provide insurance for all its people "from the cradle to the grave." The famous Beveridge report of 1942 and the National Health Service and National Insurance acts of 1946 were milestones on the way. Today, in Australia and New Zealand as well as in Great Britain, a basic program of social security is taken for granted by all parties, and, apart from details, is no longer subject to debate. The evils of industrialism were felt more tardily in Germany and the remedies applied more promptly. A national system of social insurance was instituted by Bismarck as early as the 1880s. Intent on combating the appeal of Marxian socialism, perceiving that a healthy, contented working class would make for a stronger Germany, and anxious that German workers identify themselves with the state, the Iron Chancellor, appropriating the ideas of economists like Adolf Wagner and Gustav von Schmoller, introduced the compulsory feature into social insurance and applied it to the whole German nation. The program was expanded after World War i to include unemployment as well as old age and health insurance. Austria, the Scandinavian countries, the Low Countries, and, finally, France and Italy all followed suit. By the 1930s only the United States, among the nations involved in the industrial revolution, was without a comprehensive program of social security. Its great wealth, its polyglot population, its expanding frontier which provided a built-in safety valve, and a governmental system of checks and balances that discourages decisive social action except during periods of emergency all conspired to defer basic reform. It required the great depression, which forced millions of willing workers into prolonged idleness and posed the glaring paradox
515
of mass deprivation in the midst of potential abundance, to goad the country into action. The resulting program, developed over a period of years, has been directed in the United States, as elsewhere, at the major causes of insecurity: (a) inadequate income for those who work; (£>) disabilities resulting from accident, sickness, youth, old age, widowhood, and motherhood; and (c) unemployment. Program of the welfare state Raising worker income. Improvement of income may be brought about either by increasing the amount of goods produced or by a more equitable distribution of the available supply of goods. Given glaring inequalities of income, the first concern of the welfare state in its initial phase has been to achieve distributive justice. Government action may accomplish this (1) by expanding the number of public services; (2) by a progressive tax system and a variety of taxes levied on employers for the benefit of their employees; (3) by facilitating the growth of a strong labor movement enabling workers to bargain on equal terms with their employers and a consumer movement enabling buyers to bargain more effectively with sellers; (4) by means of minimum-wage legislation. Expansion of public services. Obviously, real income is increased when society provides free services such as education, recreation, and housing to those who would otherwise not have access to them. In some circumstances free commodities (for example, surplus crops, free school lunches) and even free land may be provided (for example, the U.S. Homestead Act of 1862). It must be emphasized that where a direct transfer of real values is involved, the philosophy of the welfare state construes distributive justice not merely as dictating such a transfer but as requiring it without reference to the income of the recipients and as the fulfillment of a social obligation. Means tests are anathema to the welfare state. The United States is the only industrialized country which fails to include one of the most basic services, namely, medical care, among those provided for on this basis. As our cities fall victim to the arteriosclerosis produced by overuse of the automobile, the welfare state may find it economical as well as humane to include free public transportation. Conceivably even free architectural services may one day be added to the list as the only way to encourage the use of good design in our buildings and dwellings and thereby to rescue cities from ubiquitous ugliness. Progressive tax systems. One of the earlier devices for effecting a redistribution of income was
576
WELFARE STATE
the use of a progressive tax system, made possible in the United States by the adoption in 1913 of the sixteenth amendment to the constitution. To be sure, the extent to which income and inheritance taxes have operated in this country to effect a change in the distribution of incomes has been a subject of much debate. There are some who contend, as did P. J. Strayer, that "current practices are so bad as to seriously weaken the income tax as a means of income redistribution" and that "as now applied the individual income tax is not as effective an instrument of income redistribution as generally believed" (1955, pp. 430-431). Although adoption of a progressive tax is in principle a major modification of the traditional system of property rights, clearly it must have rigorous and consistent application to be meaningful. Such application is most closely approximated in the Scandinavian countries and Great Britain, less so in the United States, and even less so in Italy—which may well be a significant factor in the popularity of communism south of the Alps. [See TAXATION.] Labor and consumer legislation. Legislation encouraging collective bargaining as a factor in influencing the distribution of income consisted initially of removing the legal bans and disabilities imposed on labor unions during the period of Hochkapitalismus and, later, as in the United States, of requiring employers (engaged in interstate commerce) to bargain collectively with employees through unions of their own choosing. Such a requirement was embodied in American labor's Magna Charta, the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. The American consumer movement, although it has received some legislative encouragement, lags far behind consumer organizations elsewhere. This may help to account for the inability of welfare advocates in the United States to protect consumers more effectively from food and drug adulteration, mislabeling, deceptive packaging, and the like. [See LABOR UNIONS.] Minimum-wage legislation. Perhaps the most drastic departure from traditional economic practice has been the adoption of minimum-wage legislation. Certainly, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, since amended to include virtually all American workers and to raise the hourly minimum, took the United States a long way in the direction of the welfare state. [See WAGES, article on WAGE AND HOUR LEGISLATION.]
The productivity debate. When all such devices have been enumerated it must be made clear that the limiting factor in any redistribution of incomes is the point at which initiative and enterprise are discouraged with resulting loss in productivity. The
point at which such discouragement occurs is a subject of vigorous debate between partisans and opponents of the welfare state. That there is such a point, varying with each historical situation, will readily be granted; but advocates of the welfare state will argue that there is no constant called "human nature" by reference to which the issue can be settled. They will add that in the United States, where in the boom year of 1947 the top one-tenth of the population received a larger share of the national income (33 per cent) than the lowest six-tenths, the point is still far from having been reached. The issue is relevant because it directs attention to productivity as a variable in determining adequate compensation. Advocates of the welfare state have come to give far more attention than heretofore to the question of productive potentiality, calling attention, for example (as critics of the welfare state rarely do), to the glaring gap between the productive potentialities of the American economy and the size of its gross national product. They have increasingly stressed the need for measures to expand production, since the social implications of such measures are likely to be far less explosive than a redistribution of incomes. [See PRODUCTIVITY.] Aid to the disabled. The measures taken to provide more adequately for those who work are only partly applicable to those who are unable to work by virtue of physical disability. The disabled fall into two major groups: those who are too handicapped ever to have earned a livelihood, such as children, the mentally disturbed and defective, the blind; and those who, although disabled, have had a record of earned income. The welfare state provides direct grants for the adequate care and support of the first group and, where appropriate, stresses rehabilitation—as earlier programs did not. Categories of need are carefully distinguished and programs of help systematically differentiated according to category— a striking contrast to the days when the mentally disturbed were thrown together with the old, the sick, the blind and lame, and even mothers and young children, in the same institution. In the United States, aid to the disabled is accomplished imperfectly through a combination of federal, state, and local aid, federal participation on a large scale having first been made possible by the Social Security Act of 1935. That act, like the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, is one of the four cornerstones of the evolving welfare state in the United States. The second group, those disabled people with a
WELFARE STATE record of earnings, must face the double threat of the loss of earning power and the cost of care, in the event of old age, accident (occupational or other), and illness. Compulsory social insurance has become the classical means for meeting their needs. This device applies the principle that society must set aside, and require its members to set aside during the periods when they are gainfully employed, small sums of money to provide against expected or unexpected future disability. Payments and benefits usually vary, at least up to a point, with the amount of earnings of the insured. In some cases the provision is for the cost of care (as with the victims of illness or industrial accident), in others for the loss of earnings (as in the case of federal help to the aged in the United States). A mature welfare state would provide for both. The first application of the principle of compulsory social insurance in the United States was in connection with industrial accidents, the frequency of which may be suggested by the fact that American workmen in peaceful employment suffered more casualties during World War i than were suffered by the American Expeditionary Force. Initially regarded as part of the risk a workman assumes when he accepts employment, the cost of industrial accident insurance is now generally regarded as part of the cost of production and charged against employers. The cost of old-age and health insurance is generally distributed between employer and employee (many categories of self-employed are also now included), although in some instances contributions are made by the government as well. [See AGING; MEDICAL CARE, article on ECONOMIC ASPECTS.] Unemployment and the welfare state. The welfare state concerns itself not only with securing an equitable income for those who are employed and with caring for those who are incapable of employment: it also addresses itself to the problem of those who are able to work but prevented from doing so by forces over which they have no control. In such cases it is customary to distinguish between frictional unemployment and cyclical unemployment. When cyclical unemployment becomes acute it is generally called mass unemployment. Frictional unemployment was defined by William Beveridge as "unemployment caused by the individuals who make up the labour supply not being completely interchangeable and mobile units, so that, though there is an unsatisfied demand for labour, the unemployed workers are not of the right sort or in the right place to meet that demand" ([1944] 1945, pp. 408-409). Workers may be dis-
517
placed by a labor-saving device or a device they are not trained to use, because of climatic conditions or seasonal fluctuations in the market (seasonal unemployment), because of a disagreement with the employer concerning the conditions of work, because of the failure of the enterprise in which they are employed, or because they are in transit from one job to another. They are victims of frictional unemployment. Such unemployment, although it can be reduced to a bare minimum, as U.S. wartime experience has shown, is unavoidable and may involve about 2 per cent of the work force. In a populous society like that of the United States, with a work force of over 70 million, this can involve a great many people. In the prewelfare period the victims of frictional unemployment were largely left to their own devices or forced to seek public or private charity. Today, in every economically developed country, since Bismarck introduced "socialism from above" in Germany, the problem of frictional unemployment is in the main met by compulsory unemployment insurance. In the United States such insurance was largely unavailable until it was incorporated into the Social Security Act of 1935. However, as has often been pointed out, while unemployment payments may solve the problem of want, the problem of enforced idleness with all of its demoralizing consequences remains. Measures must therefore be taken to facilitate the re-employment of displaced workers by retraining them for work suited to their abilities, by providing adequate counseling services, and by setting up unemployment offices. All these are part of the armory of the welfare state. Traditionally, frictional unemployment has been regarded as unemployment of short duration. Recently, increasing attention has been given to "hardcore" or "prosperity" unemployment, sometimes described as prolonged frictional unemployment and more technically called "structural." Structural unemployment involves workers who are made jobless not as a result of recessions or depressions but by large-scale changes in technology, shifts in consumer taste, and the development of new products. It may also refer to changes in the composition of the labor force: large-scale additions of younger workers, resulting from continuing population growth; of older workers, resulting from an extension of the life span; of female workers; or of previously excluded members of minority groups. Such structural unemployment is not associated with fluctuations in the business cycle and is therefore called "secular." However, to the extent that it is not only more prolonged but potentially much more
518
WELFARE STATE
widespread than frictional unemployment, structural unemployment must be regarded as a form of mass unemployment, so that, like cyclical unemployment, it must ultimately exhaust the resources of even the most generous unemployment insurance system. Beyond this, advocates of the philosophy underlying the welfare state contend that the etiology of structural unemployment is more akin to cyclical than to frictional unemployment. Frictional unemployment is largely unavoidable and we can only palliate its consequences. On the other hand, the structurally unemployed are out of work for the same reason that the cyclically unemployed are without work: not because they are intrinsically unemployable but because there is not enough effective demand for their services; the economy does not function at a sufficiently high level to utilize all its manpower. Thus, Walter W. Heller, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President, in hearings before the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, declared: Some have attributed the growth of unemployment in recent years to changing characteristics of the labor force rather than to deficiencies in total demand. According to this view, the new unemployment is concentrated among workers who are intrinsically unemployable by reason of sex, age, location, occupation, or skill. . . . The facts clearly refute this explanation of the rise of unemployment over the last 8 years. . . . There is no evidence that hard-core unemployment has been growing as a percent of the labor force. (U.S. Congress . . . 1961)
The difference cited by Heller is crucial, for, if he is correct, it must follow that the welfare state cannot afford to limit itself to concern with the effects of structural unemployment but, as with cyclical or mass unemployment, must address itself to causes. For these reasons and because neither direct relief, nor insurance benefits, nor any welfare program thus far cited can cope with the effects of mass unemployment, whether it be secular (structural) or cyclical, advocates of the welfare state have taken the position that, in the words of Beveridge's now famous Full Employment in a Free Society, "It must be a function of the State . . . to protect its citizens against mass unemployment, as definitely as it is now the function of the State to defend the citizens against attack from abroad and against robbery and violence at home" ([1944] 1945, p. 29). Among American economists, Alvin H. Hansen, in his Economic Policy and Full Employment, has taken the lead, declaring that if "the
right to free land was the watchword of economic opportunity a hundred years ago, so the right to useful, remunerative, and regular employment is the symbol of economic opportunity today" and adding that "the full-employment program today . . . involves elemental human rights . . . so long as 80 to 90 percent of the population cannot earn a livelihood except by getting a job" (1947, p. 16). It was such reasoning that inspired the white paper on employment policy produced in 1944 by Britain's wartime coalition government and, in the United States, the historic Employment Act of 1946 (Public Law 304, 79th Congress). That act, the fourth cornerstone in the welfare edifice of the United States, goes well beyond the British white paper, stating: [It is] the continuing policy and responsibility of the Federal Government to use all practicable means . . . to promote maximum employment, production, and purchasing power [and] to coordinate and utilize all its plans, functions, and resources for the purpose of creating and maintaining, in a manner calculated to foster and promote free competitive enterprise and the general welfare, conditions under which there will be afforded useful employment opportunities, including self-employment, for those able, willing, and seeking to work. (Declaration of Policy, sec. 2)
While the legislation sets up no actual machinery for combating unemployment and a great deal of exegetic skill has been expended on the words "maximum employment, production, and purchasing power," the measure, inspired by postwar fears of a return to mass unemployment, is a remarkable commitment—all the more so in that Senate Republicans, led by Robert A. Taft, joined Democrats in making it. Traditionally, mass unemployment has been regarded as akin to a natural disaster to be waited out,in storm cellars as one sits out a tornado. The Employment Act of 1946 assumes that mass unemployment can be averted and declares this to be the responsibility of government. The logic of this commitment has led almost inescapably to an acceptance of fiscal and monetary policy as essential to economic recovery and hence as integral to any basic welfare program. Thus, over the edifice of the welfare state there hovers the presence of John Maynard Keynes, whose General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) has been the Bible of the great majority of depression and postdepression economists and policy makers. To be sure, Bibles, whether in the version of St. James or St. John (or St. Karl) are subject to revision in the Western world. But Keynes's bold rejection of the classical thesis that depressions are self-correcting if wages are allowed
WELFARE STATE to sink; his perception of the relation of wage rates to effective demand; his recognition of the role of fiscal policy, in particular deficit spending, in correcting economic contraction; and above all, his theory of secular stagnation, which calls attention to the tendency of a developed capitalist economy to find equilibrium at a level of underemployment in the absence of adequate fiscal policy—all this endures and has become part of the Western philosophy of the welfare state. [See EMPLOYMENT AND UNEMPLOYMENT.]
New directions Such are the outlines of the welfare philosophy inspired by the crudities of primitive capitalism and the agonies of the interbellum depression. But that philosophy is not a fixed one, and in the mid-1960s new emphases were already discernible. In the first place, the welfare state in its present outline bears the mark of its origins in the needs of the poor and oppressed. Especially in the United States, the reforms that ushered in the welfare state were a product of the 1930s and therefore concentrated on the pressing and urgent problems. The energies of reformers were absorbed in finding remedies for mass deprivation and mass unemployment. Security against want is still an unrealized goal in America. In the richest nation in all history the annual income of almost twenty million families falls below the $4,000 that the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated in 1959 as necessary for an urban family of four to maintain an adequate standard of living. However, the "War on Poverty" launched by the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, although it has yet to score impressive victories, employs imaginative stratagems, such as Project Head Start, VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America—a domestic version of the Peace Corps), community action programs. Increasingly, proposals are heard for cash subsidies in the form of a "negative" or "reverse" income tax. A blue-ribbon national commission has urged that the federal government become the employer of last resort for the hardcore jobless and guarantee a minimum annual income for every American family. As welfare programs, new and old, mitigate the more extreme forms of suffering, architects of the welfare state are increasingly thinking in terms of the acute problems directly threatening society as a whole—the prosperous as well as the poor, whites as well as Negroes, the native born as well as the immigrant. Uniquely in human history, Americans have been evacuating their cities not because there is an invader at the gates but because they are less
51 9
and less viable as communities in which to work and raise families. And, as William H. Whyte, Jr., has pointed out, even if our cities were less afflicted with blight, congestion, and the other maladies lately christened "metropolitan problems," large numbers of families in the middle-income group now ineligible for public housing cannot afford new housing in urban areas. The urban problem, the minority crisis in the United States, automation, the challenge posed by the accelerating growth rate of the Soviet Union and the rising expectations of underdeveloped nations, all present problems which directly concern modern society as a whole. To the extent that the welfare state concerns itself with them it will lose its class orientation, and social welfare will come more and more to mean that general welfare from which it has been distinguished in the past. A second, not unrelated change of emphasis in the philosophy of the welfare state is also discernible, at any rate as far as the United States is concerned. It is clear to advocates of the welfare state that economic security can now be made available to all Americans without a socially explosive redistribution of wealth. The technology and natural resources for producing such abundance are available, and economists are now (as they were not in the 1930s) in sufficient command of their science to use fiscal and monetary policies so as to achieve optimum production. The problem is a political one involving the will to do what can be done. Once this will is exercised, a different kind of problem will increasingly confront the welfare state. It concerns not the quantity of goods but the kind of goods we produce. Ultimately it concerns the quality of life in the good society. As recently posed by John Kenneth Galbraith, it involves the order of priorities by reference to which we allocate our human and physical resources. It is Galbraith's contention in The Affluent Society (1958) that the prevailing pattern of resource allocation in the United States is biased so that basic needs are grossly neglected and that this bias is not decreed by the so-called sovereign consumer. The American economy is geared, it is said, to the satisfaction of artificially induced consumer wants, such as oversized automobiles restyled annually at a cost of about $1 billion; attire, also restyled annually, which by the decree of a cabal of manufacturers can be made antiquated almost overnight; newly styled household appliances that are no better than the ones they replace unless the older models have been underengineered; countless gadgets, from electric can openers to push-button car windows; and an array of deodorants, skin softeners, hair growers,
520
WELFARE STATE
and wrinkle removers that even a race of Sybarites would scorn. In 1959, $11 billion worth of advertising, not to mention the cost of other forms of high-pressure salesmanship, was spent to persuade consumers that they should have these things. Meanwhile, basic needs in many areas have been neglected in the name of economy. In the mid1960s, education required an investment of more than $5 billion; medical care was short one million new hospital beds; public health needed measures for purification of air and water and restoration of sewage disposal systems. There were also basic needs for support of the arts and humanities; for at least a token investment of, say, $40 million in educational television stations, which a congressional committee declared Americans could not afford—while they were spending about $300 million on chewing gum; for additional funds for basic research in the biological sciences; and so on. In the 1930s Keynes, preoccupied with increasing production, could write that he saw no reason to suppose that the existing system "seriously misemploys the factors of production." It seems likely that the welfare philosophy of tomorrow (if not of today) will charge that, on this score, Keynes falls short. Such a philosophy, if it is also democratic, will categorically reject the idea that a few elected officials may compel others to spend their incomes in one way rather than another; it will simply insist that conditions be provided which enable consumers when they make purchases, and citizens when they vote taxes, to make more rational decisions. Such conditions would no doubt include a commission on national goals having access to the most expert opinion and empowered to hold hearings and sponsor conferences at all levels, national, regional, and local. It would also be empowered to use the formidable resources of television (including prime time) on a grand scale to acquaint citizens en masse with the condition of their schools, hospitals, housing, parks, streams, etc., and with the economic as well as the social cost of neglecting them, not to mention the cost of overburdening and underpaying teachers, probation officers, hospital attendants, and others. Additional conditions might include better controls over advertising and, in the political sphere, a reorganization of the legislative branches of the government at all levels, which might prevent small, strategically placed committees from obstructing the will of large legislative majorities. Clearly, these are concerns far removed from the humiliations of the almshouse and the degradations of the early factory system, against which the wel-
fare state in its first phases was an institutionalized protest. That is to say, these conditions are removed from the exclusive preoccupation with minimal security that has largely dominated the welfare state. But they appeal to the same kind of social conscience and enlist the same sense of social justice. The welfare state, whether as thus prefigured or in its present form, invites widely differing appraisals, especially in the United States. Its critics regard it as the omnicompetent state, pre-empting the private efforts through which individuals achieve moral stature by helping each other; sapping initiative; coddling the inferior; and ultimately regimenting everyone. The Soviet Union provides security and all the social services for its citizens; it is also a barracks state. So runs the argument. Apologists for the welfare state in the free world, less optimistic about the possibilities of achieving Utopia than nineteenth-century reformers and more alert to the hazards of statism since the rise of modern totalitarianism, insist that the welfare state not only leaves ample room for self-help and for what businessmen in the United States call "welfare capitalism": it ultimately encourages creative initiative and promotes freedom by banishing fear, by minimizing suffering, and by reducing class and other antagonisms. They argue also that the welfare state is quite compatible with an economic system in which free enterprise plays a central role, although they may differ among themselves concerning whether the welfare state should limit itself to compensating for the imbalances and minimizing the frictions to which a free economy is inevitably subject, or seek positively to advance general prosperity and happiness. Meanwhile history has rendered a verdict concerning the tendencies of the welfare state, partial (in a double sense) though historical verdicts always are. That verdict may be found by looking to the Soviet Union and its regimented people. But it may also be found by turning to the Scandinavian countries, to Great Britain, to West Germany, to Australia and New Zealand, and to the United States. It would be difficult to charge that the peoples of these countries are regimented or that private enterprise does not enjoy a flourishing life of its own even in the most "socialistic" of them. In any event, there are no signs, outside of marginal groups mostly centered in the United States, of a disposition to curb the welfare state. It rides the wave of the future. HARRY K. GIRVETZ
WELTANSCHAUUNG [See also CAPITALISM; LEISURE; PHILANTHROPY; PLANNING, SOCIAL, article on WELFARE PLANNING; POVERTY; PUBLIC POLICY; REGULATION OF INDUSTRY; SOCIALISM; and the biographies of BENTHAM; BEVERIDGE; BRANDEIS; HANSEN; KEYNES; WEBB, SIDNEY AND BEATRICE.] BIBLIOGRAPHY ARMSTRONG, BARBARA N. 1932 Insuring the Essentials: Minimum Wage Plus Social Insurance—a Living Wage Program. New York: Macmillan. BEVERIDGE, WILLIAM HENRY (1944) 1945 Full Employment in a Free Society. New York: Norton. BOOTH, CHARLES et al. (1889-1891) 1902-1903 Life and Labour of the People in London. 17 vols. London: Macmillan. BRUCE, MAURICE 1961 The Coming of the Welfare State. London: Batsford. BURNS, EVELINE M. 1949 The American Social Security System. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. BURNS, EVELINE M. 1956 Social Security and Public Policy. New York: McGraw-Hill. CARLSON, VALDEMAR 1962 Economic Security in the United States. New York: McGraw-Hill. CLARKE, C. E. 1950 Social Insurance in Britain: A Text Book for Actuarial Students. Cambridge Univ. Press. CONDLIFFE, J. B. 1959 The Welfare State in New Zealand. London: Allen & Unwin; New York: Macmillan. DE GRAZIA, ALFRED; and GURR, TED 1961 American Welfare. New York Univ. Press. DE SCHWEINITZ, KARL 1943 England's Road to Social Security: From the Statute of Laborers in 1349 to the Beveridge Report of 1942. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press. -» A paperback edition was published in 1961. DICEY, ALBERT VENN (1905) 1914 Lectures on the Relation Between Law and Public Opinion in England, During the Nineteenth Century. 2d ed. London and New York: Macmillan. -» A paperback edition was published in 1962. EPSTEIN, ABRAHAM (1933) 1936 Insecurity; a Challenge to America: A Study of Social Insurance in the United States and Abroad. 3d ed., rev. New York: Random House. FISHER, A. G. B. 1945 Economic Progress and Social Security. New York and London: Macmillan. FRIEDLANDER, WALTER A. 1955 Introduction to Social Welfare. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. FRIEDLANDER, WALTER A. 1962 Individualism and Social Welfare: An Analysis of the System of Social Security and Social Welfare in France. New York: Free Press. GALBRAITH, JOHN KENNETH 1958 The Affluent Society. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. GIRVETZ, HARRY K. (1950) 1963 The Evolution of Liberalism. Rev. ed. New York: Collier. ->• First published as From Wealth to Welfare: The Evolution of Liberalism. GREAT BRITAIN, INTERDEPARTMENTAL COMMITTEE ON SOCIAL INSURANCE AND ALLIED SERVICES 1942 Report on Social Insurance and Allied Services. Papers by Command, Cmd. 6404. London: H. M. Stationery Office; New York: Macmillan. -> Known as the Beveridge Report. HANSEN, ALVIN H. 1947 Economic Policy and Full Employment. New York and London: McGraw-Hill.
52 I
HARRINGTON, MICHAEL 1962 The Other America: Poverty in the United States. New York: Macmillan. HERSKOVITS, MELVILLE J. (1940) 1952 Economic Anthropology: A Study in Comparative Economics. 2d ed., rev. & enl. New York: Knopf. KEYNES, JOHN MAYNARD 1936 The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. London: Macmillan. -» A paperback edition was published in 1965 by Harcourt. LIPPMANN, WALTER (1937) 1954 Inquiry Into the Principles of the Good Society. Rev. ed. Boston: Little. -» A paperback edition was published in 1956 as Good Society. MYRDAL, GUNNAR (1960) 1963 Beyond the Welfare State. Yale University, School of Law, Storrs Lectures on Jurisprudence, 1958. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. MYRDAL, GUNNAR 1963 Challenge to Affluence. New York: Pantheon. RICHARDSON, JOHN HENRY 1960 Economic and Financial Aspects of Social Security: An International Survey. Univ. of Toronto Press; London: Allen & Unwin. ROWNTREE, BENJAMIN SEEBOHM (1901) 1922 Poverty: A Study of Town Life. New ed. London and New York: Longmans. -» A study of the poor in York, England. RUBINOW, ISAAC M. 1934 The Quest for Security. New York: Holt. SPENCER, HERBERT (1850) 1954 Social Statics: The Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed. London: Routledge; New York: Humanities. STRAYER, PAUL J. 1955 The Individual Income Tax and Income Distribution. American Economic Review 45, no. 2:430-440. TURNBULL, JOHN G. 1966 The Changing Faces of Economic Insecurity. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press. U.S. CONGRESS, SENATE, COMMITTEE ON LABOR AND PUBLIC WELFARE 1961 Unemployment Situation and Outlook: Hearings Before the Sub-committee on Employment and Manpower. 87th Congress, 1st Session, Feb. 22-March 9, 1961. Washington: Government Printing Office. VASEY, WAYNE 1958 Government and Social Welfare: Roles of Federal, State and Local Governments in Administering Welfare Services. New York: Holt. WEBB, SIDNEY; and WEBB, BEATRICE (editors) 1909 The Break-up of the Poor Law. London and New York: Longmans. -> This is Part 1 of the Minority Report of the Royal Commission on Poor Laws and Relief of Distress. Part 2 was published as The Public Organisation of the Labour Market. WEBER, MAX (1904-1905) 1930 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons, with a foreword by R. H. Tawney. London: Allen & Unwin; New York: Scribner. -» Translated from the 1920 revision of the German edition. WILENSKY, HAROLD L.; and LEBEAUX, CHARLES N. 1958 Industrial Society and Social Welfare: The Impact of Industrialization on the Supply and Organization of Social Welfare Services in the United States. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
WELTANSCHAUUNG See MANNHEIM; WORLD VIEW.
522
WERTHEIMER, MAX WERTHEIMER, MAX
Max Wertheimer (1880-1943), the originator of gestalt psychology, was born in Prague, the second of two sons of Wilhelm and Rosa Zwicker Wertheimer. His interests reflect the activities of his home, where he came in contact with problems of science, politics, music, art, and education. His father was so successful in tutoring shorthand and bookkeeping that he resigned his position in a bank to devote full time to teaching these subjects. He devised new methods of teaching and eventually established and directed a school, the Handelsschule Wertheimer. The older son, Walter, was trained to succeed his father in the directorship (but died in early adulthood). Wertheimer also participated in discussions of the activities of the school and invented computational devices and a bookkeeping machine. This involvement broadened into an absorbing interest in mathematics as well as in methods of teaching. His mother was a proficient amateur pianist and dramatist who informally taught Wertheimer how to play the piano. At an early age he also received violin lessons and showed a general aptitude for music.. During his teens he composed chamber music and wrote symphonies; it seemed then that he would become a professional musician. Through music he often established social relationships: it brought him in contact with Albert Einstein, with whom he played chamber music and discussed philosophy and science; and Wertheimer's friends, as well as his students, recall the manner in which he often improvised on the piano and asked them to guess the person, object, or event being "described." He participated in musicological research at the University of Berlin and liked to use examples from music in his writings and lectures to demonstrate the concept of structure. In his youth Wertheimer wrote poetry and had friends in literary circles, including the writers Max Brod and Franz Werfel. In later years he was involved with them and with Thomas G. Masaryk (the first president of Czechoslovakia) in the initial plans for certain government projects in the areas of education and welfare. His literary interest is reflected in his own writings and in the work he edited. He insisted not only on the logical expression of ideas but also on a "good style"—one that would help reveal the structure of the ideas. This concern over combining style with logical structure as an integral unity (a task he always admitted was difficult) may explain in part why he wrote so little. Perhaps it was the poet in him that led to his pains-
taking care in the use of words and to his search for the mot juste and for effective presentation. Wertheimer was introduced to social and philosophical thought by his maternal grandfather, Jakob Zwicker, who was so pleased by his grandson's maturity of understanding that on his tenth birthday he gave him a copy of Spinoza's writings. The boy's complete absorption in the book led his parents to restrict his reading, but he continued to read Spinoza secretly with the connivance of the maid, who concealed the book in her trunk. Spinoza was not a passing fancy but exerted a lifelong influence on Wertheimer. When he finished at the Gymnasium (at age 18), it was difficult for him to decide on an area of specialization. In 1900 he matriculated in law at the Charles University in Prague, but before the year was over, he found himself more interested in the philosophy of law than in its practice. He particularly objected to the way in which trials became contests: the defense and prosecution seemed more interested in winning cases than in discovering the truth. Wertheimer was interested in ways of getting at the truth. This led him to work in the psychology of testimony. In 1901 he left Prague for the University of Berlin, where he studied psychology and did research with Carl Stumpf and Friedrich Schumann. In 1903 he enrolled at the University of Wiirzburg where he studied with Oswald Kiilpe and was awarded the PH.D. degree, summa cum laude, in 1904 [see the biography of KULPEJ. His doctoral research involved the invention of a lie detector, which he used as an objective means of studying testimony. Another aspect of his work was the wordassociation technique, which he devised before C. G. Jung developed it as a diagnostic technique. After obtaining his PH.D., he continued his research in testimony, publishing with J. Klein a classical work in the area (1904). Since he was financially independent, he did not have to hold any academic position and was able to devote himself at various times to independent study and research in Prague, Berlin, and Vienna. He did research on alexia at the Neuropsychiatric Clinic at the University of Vienna, devising new diagnostic methods which demonstrated that alexia involves the loss of ability to perceive ambiguous and complex visual structures. This work is the link between gestalt psychology and the theorizing of the neurologists Adhemar Gelb and Kurt Goldstein, who after World War i were Wertheimer's colleagues at the University of Frankfurt. (Wertheimer's work between 1905 and 1912 was never published. However, before and
WERTHEIMER, MAX after World War i, Gelb and Goldstein developed methods of diagnosing and treating aphasic patients that were based on assumptions similar to Wertheimer's ideas.) Early gestalt theories While in Vienna Wertheimer began to formulate ideas which were later to become essential components of gestalt psychology. It seemed to him that psychology was becoming divorced from the concrete realities of daily life; the problems at the center of academic psychology bore little resemblance to the actual behavior of man. He was dissatisfied with the way in which problems were formulated, with the pedantry of what was considered the exact approach, and with methodology that restricted creative approaches. The solution did not lie in rejecting a scientific or theoretical approach to psychology but in somehow keeping theory in touch with the reality with which it purportedly deals. What was needed, according to Wertheimer, was the development of methods that would meet exacting scientific standards but would not destroy or change a phenomenon, so that it became an artifact of the method. During this time he had been doing research on music at the Berlin Phonogram Archives (e.g., 1910) and had investigated the thinking of feebleminded children and of primitive people. In his work on music he confirmed what C. von Ehrenfels had previously pointed out, that a melody cannot be understood merely in terms of its individual notes; but he went beyond this formulation. He demonstrated, among other things, that the recognition of an altered melody does not depend on the number of notes changed but on the notes' positions in the melody's structure. The meaning of the individual notes depends on their place, role, and function in the melody. In his work with feebleminded children (which, again, was not published) he noted that they are able to solve a problem if they can comprehend its structural requirements. The extent to which the method of presentation clearly revealed these structural requirements determined the amount of difficulty the children had in perceiving certain structures and in understanding and solving problems. His analysis of the number concepts of primitive people showed the need to study the structural features of these concepts and demonstrated that the additive concept of number is only one of a variety of structures. In this work occurred instances of numerical structures, or "wholes," that cannot be understood by arbitrarily dividing them into parts, studying
523
these parts in isolation, and then describing the whole as nothing but the sum of such piecemeal analysis. Although piecemeal analysis is appropriate for certain aggregates or structures, there are others that do not lend themselves to it. Analysis of such wholes must begin with attempts to discover the natural structural and functional features or parts of the phenomena and then proceed to study the place, role, and function of these parts in the total structure. This approach was later to be termed the method "from above" to distinguish it from the method "from below." Wertheimer saw the need to replace description based on an "and-summation" of arbitrarily determined elements with description based on structural understanding that intrinsically relates parts to their context. Experiments and interpretations To establish these ideas in a more precise manner, Wertheimer sought examples from the field of perception, an area of psychology with a high reputation for exactness. He had little success until 1910, when he went on a trip, and while on the train, he thought of an optical phenomenon that seemed suitable. At Frankfurt he got off the train and bought a toy stroboscope. In a hotel room he set up the experiment by substituting strips of paper on which he had drawn series of lines for the pictures in the toy. The results were as expected: by varying the time interval between the exposure of the lines, he found that he could see one line after another, two lines standing side by side, or a line moving from one position to another. This '"movement" came to be known as the Phi phenomenon. Wertheimer asked Schumann, his former teacher at Berlin and now at the Frankfurt Psychological Institute, if he could provide someone to act as an experimental subject. Schumann's laboratory assistant, Wolfgang Kohler, came. For the next experimental session, Kohler brought his friend Kurt Koffka, who also served as a subject. Kohler and Koffka were receptive to new theories, and the three discussed the implications of the experiment. Kohler persuaded Schumann to visit Wertheimer and to invite him to conduct his experiment at the Frankfurt Institute. A simple apparatus to demonstrate the Phi phenomenon was constructed, and the now classical experiment was conducted (Wertheimer 1912a). Wertheimer explained the significance of the experiment as follows: "What do we see when we see the movements of a hand or a light? Is it appropriate to say that we have a sensation in different
524
WERTHEIMER, MAX
places on the retina from which movement is inferred? Is it appropriate to cut the phenomenon of movement in this way into a number of static sensations?" (1937), Although there had been psychologists and philosophers before him who believed that movement was not an inference from static sensations on the retina but was a sensation sui generis, they had not demonstrated this in a scientific manner. Wertheimer now presented the thesis in a way which made experimental decisions possible. It was not merely Wertheimer's experiment but his formulation of the underlying problem and the way he proceeded to solve this problem that launched gestalt psychology. Through experimental variations, he tested, one by one, various possible explanations of the Phi phenomenon and found them wanting. According to Wertheimer, the essential features of the Phi phenomenon are the following : it is a counter example to the assumption that piecemeal and and-summative approaches to psychological phenomena are universally adequate; it belongs to a category of genuine dynamic experiences which must be understood in terms of dynamics rather than reduced to static events; finally, it is an example of a structure that is not an arbitrary arrangement of events but has inner connectedness (1937). Wertheimer felt that there was a need for a model of such dynamic experiences, and he hypothesized a possible physiological process: "The motion is due to a field of activity among cells, . . . not excitation in isolated cells but field effects" (1937). This model applies concepts of field-theoretical physics to a neurological event. Although Wertheimer has been given credit for anticipating aspects of contemporary neurophysiological theory, he insisted in his lectures that his object had not been to state a neurophysiological theory of movement but rather to show how a dynamic event may take place and what is meant by the structure of a field of events. Nor did he consider it crucial that he had advanced a nonmotor conception of motion. "Even if it were a motor theory, we would still have the question of presenting the dynamic, structural features of the phenomenon" (1937). The issue was not one of optics versus motor behavior but of piecemeal versus dynamic analysis, inner relatedness versus arbitrary and-summation. The importance of the Phi phenomenon is attested to not only by the commotion created when Wertheimer reported on it at the 1911 Psychological Congress (some members of the audience realized that they were witnessing the beginning of a new era in psychology) but also by the impact it
had on psychological thought and the collaborative and brilliant research with Koffka and Kohler which it engendered. Wertheimer also collaborated with Gelb, Goldstein, and Kurt Lewin, who all developed theories which are closely related to gestalt psychology. He directed students' research projects that are classics in experimentation, e.g., the work of Karl Duncker. Much of this research was in perception, but not because gestalt psychology was primarily concerned with developing a theory of perception or with explaining behavior through perception. "It is a fairy tale that Gestalt psychology is centered on problems of perception," Wertheimer said. "Perception was chosen because we could get the best scientific techniques in this area" (1937). For the same reason, he used examples of the perception of visual form to illustrate some principles of organization, autochthonous as well as experiential, which have general relevance to the organization or structure of psychological phenomena. He did not claim that the gestalt concepts of Pragnanz, closure, and symmetry are the only principles of perception or organization; he even included in the laws of organization such purely associationistic concepts as habit due to contiguity. The problem as he defined it was to determine the realm in which each principle holds and to find out under what conditions a certain one is crucial. So defined, gestalt theory becomes more than a mere theory: it becomes an approach to research and to theory building. Although Wertheimer did not like to engage in polemics with regard to the philosophical implications of his research, others have linked gestalt psychology with various philosophical views. It has at various times been characterized as Platonism, Kantian apriorism, and holism (Madden 1962); such allegations ignore concrete research and attribute assumptions to gestalt psychologists which they have in fact taken pains to reject. Similarities have also been noted between gestalt psychology and relativity theory, perhaps because both are field theories. This similarity was often acknowledged by Wertheimer. Less often noted are the relationships between gestalt theory and the pragmatic experimentalism of John Dewey, the ideas of perceptual causality of Alfred N. Whitehead, and the mathematical intuitionism of L. E. J. Brouwer, particularly Brouwer's concern with intuitively clear concepts, his rejection of the idea that the laws of Aristotelian logic are the laws of thinking, and his distinction between thought and its written expression (Wertheimer 1945; Heyting 1956; Luchins & Luchins 1965; Mays 1959). Wertheimer himself did not generally think in
WERTHEIMER, MAX 525 words, and this may have helped convince him that not all thinking is verbal or subvocal behavior. Nor did he believe that fundamental problems of psychology, of other sciences, and of mathematics are primarily linguistic or logical problems. Although he did not deny the importance of putting thought into precise logical form, he recognized that this was not necessarily the form in which the thinking had originally occurred. He searched for clear-cut examples, free of linguistic ambiguity, to demonstrate a concept, and he considered a good demonstration better than many pages of description. Professional career During World War i Wertheimer was a captain in the German army and did research with the physiologist Erich von Hornbostel on the development of a direction finder for locating the source of sounds. Wertheimer was pleased that the direction finder illustrated gestalt principles of auditory perception, but it disturbed him that the device had military applications in the aiming of shells and torpedoes. From 1916 to 1929 Wertheimer was Privatdozent at the University of Berlin. His lectures were considered brilliant, and his seminars stimulated students to do original thinking. The classes were large (as many as 150 students and faculty members attended), and they attracted not only psychologists but also sociologists, philosophers, logicians, mathematicians, and physicists. Kurt Gottschaldt, a student at the time, has recalled that Wertheimer knew how to discuss a problem thoroughly and how to raise questions which led to crucial experiments. His classes were conducted democratically, with lively interaction between the students and himself, and led to discussions that sometimes continued at his home after class. In 1923, during his stay in Berlin, he married Anne Caro. Also while in Berlin, together with Koffka, Kohler, Goldstein, and Hans Gruhle, he started the Psychologische Forschung and served as editor for Volumes 1 through 20, from 1922 to 1935. George Humphrey has recalled that he once wrote Wertheimer to ask that a correction be made in his article and that Wertheimer held up publication for several days, maintaining that it was more important to be accurate than for the journal to appear on time. In the spring of 1929 Wertheimer became a professor at the University of Frankfurt. He conducted courses and research in social and experimental psychology as well as seminars on fundamental problems of mathematics and logic, productive thinking, and a philosophical seminar with Gelb,
Paul Tillich, and Kurt Riezler. Edwin Rauch, then his research assistant, has indicated that the same spirit prevailed in his classes at Frankfurt as in Berlin and has noted the sadness of both students and colleagues when the approaching Nazi tyranny caused Wertheimer to leave Germany. His departure did not diminish the impact of his teaching. His students are among the outstanding psychologists in Europe and in their work openly acknowledge their indebtedness to him; e.g., Wolfgang Metzger is director of the Psychological Institute at the University of Miinster, Rauch is director of the Psychological Institute at the University at Frankfurt, and Gottschaldt was director of the Psychological Institute at the University of Berlin before moving to the University of Gottingen. In March 1933, two days before Hitler became chancellor, the Wertheimers went to a neighbor's house and for the first time listened to one of Hitler's speeches (they had no radio at home). The speech so disturbed Wertheimer that on the way home he decided to depart secretly the next morning. Leaving all their possessions, he and his wife and their children went to the summer resort of Marienbad in Czechoslovakia. There he received an invitation from Alvin Johnson to join the New School for Social Research in New York, and the Wertheimers went to the United States in September 1933. Wertheimer became an American citizen in 1939. Among his services to his adopted country were his participation in the organization of the Voice of America and his research on an easy and reliable method of teaching the Morse code to soldiers. At the New School, an adult education institution which introduced to America some of the leading European behavioral scientists, Wertheimer conducted adult education courses, graduate courses, and seminars on a wide variety of subjects, including logic, social psychology, educational psychology, the psychology of music and art, and experimental psychology; he also participated in interdisciplinary seminars. He combined scholarship with teaching skill and could make a complex problem clear by a simple chalk drawing, by playing the piano, or by improvising an experiment or story. It was impressive to see how he presented positions with which he did not agree: if no student would defend the position, he himself would do so. He was not interested in students' going home with notebooks full of answers but in their becoming curious about the phenomena discussed. Wertheimer was not an ivory-tower professor but was concerned with social issues. His seminars on social psychology focused on national and interna-
526
WERTHEIMER, MAX
tional problems as well as on concepts and theories to explain them. He was distressed that some people claimed there was a relationship between the Nazi slogan "The whole (state) is more than the sum of its parts" and gestalt theory's premise—which actually was that the whole may be different from its parts studied in isolation. After his first two years at the New School, his seminars, in effect, became colloquia in which American and European professors and graduate students presented their work and exchanged ideas. Wertheimer showed great interest in the work of others, even when he did not agree with them, and he was most generous with his time (often to the detriment of his own work) and helped many people plan and write up their research. As in Europe, his home in New Rochelle, New York, was open to students and professors. Influence Wertheimer urged his students to report "everything that happens regardless of the particular aim of an experiment." He would often point out unanticipated problems which the data suggested, and sometimes these became new foci of research. Thus he taught his students to structure and restructure their views of the phenomena studied. Although he did not have the kind of research facilities to which he had been accustomed in Europe, he was able to engage in and supervise research in social psychology, problem solving, perception, personality, and learning. He had many new ideas about experiments and theories, most of which he did not publish but some of which became the basis of research conducted and published by the participants in the seminars. This group includes the following: Rudolf Arnheim, Solomon Asch, George Katona, Abraham S. Luchins, Abraham H. Maslow, David Rapaport, Martin Scheerer, and Herman Witkin. Their work and the work of their students are frequently cited in contemporary psychological literature. The breadth of Wertheimer's interests and the variety of problems with which he was concerned often amazed people. Koffka once said of him, "There isn't a thing he doesn't know!" Strangers may therefore have been surprised when first meeting him to find so modest a man, of slight stature with twinkling eyes and a "soup strainer" moustache, who was concerned with his visitors as people and was interested in ordinary things that seemed to have no general significance. This concern with the particular appears to have been one of the important motifs underlying much of his work. He wanted to develop methods and concepts that would grasp the essential features of the par-
ticular and yet not lose sight of the generality that it reflects. The fall of 1943 found him actively engaged in teaching and research activities, in working for the war effort, in seeking to obtain positions for refugee scholars, and in planning the postwar psychology department at the New School for Social Research. In the midst of these activities he died suddenly of a coronary thrombosis. He left an unpublished manuscript which was posthumously published as Productive Thinking (1945). In it he pointed out the need to differentiate between the laws of logic and the laws of thought, between habitual, imitative behavior and creative, productive acts of thinking. He stressed the need for teachers and textbook writers to present material in such a way that it reveals the structural feature of a problem: good teaching reveals the structure, bad teaching beclouds the structure, of the subject matter. Wertheimer was not a theory builder. He was opposed to the idea that repetition is the mother of learning and was concerned with the negative effects of repetition, i.e., mechanization and habituation. His views have led to studies of factors that maximize or minimize habituation and mechanization in problem solving and thinking (Katona 1940; Luchins 1942). Of him it can be said with even more justice what Prentice said of Kohler: "The many theoretical views, hypotheses, and concepts . . . proposed over the forty years of his association with a particular point of view are often loosely related . . . he has never made any attempt to derive large numbers of facts in psychology from a limited number of postulates" (Prentice 1959, p. 427). Gestalt psychology is a viewpoint that has had a stimulating influence on psychology as a science. Wertheimer is considered by most gestalt psychologists who were associated with him as the catalyst that helped create their work. A lecture or a conversation with him is often cited as reference for or source of the problem in question. His greatness lay in his ability to fire the imagination and creativeness of two generations of psychologists in America and abroad. ABRAHAM S. LUCHINS [See also GESTALT THEORY. Other relevant material may be found in FIELD THEORY; PERCEPTION; PROBLEM SOLVING; THINKING; and in the biographies of GOLDSTEIN; KOFFKA; KOHLER; KULPE; LEWIN; RAPAPORT; STUMPF.]
WORKS BY WERTHEIMER 1904 WERTHEIMER, MAX; and KLEIN, J. Psychologische Tatbestandsdiagnostik. Archiv fur Kriminalanthropologie und Kriminalistik 15:72-113.
WEST, EDWARD 1910
Musik der Wedda. Sammelbande der Internationalen Musikgesellschaft 11:300-309. 1912a Experimentelle Studien iiber das Sehen von Bewegung. Zeitschrift fur Psychologic und Physiologic der Sinnesorgane 61:161-265. 1912fc Uber das Denken der Naturvolker: 1. Zahlen und Zahlgebilde. Zeitschrift fur Psychologic und Physiologic der Sinnesorgane 60:321-378. 1923 Untersuchungen zur Lehre von der Gestalt, 2. Psychologische Forschung 4:301-350. 1937 [Lectures on Experimental Psychology Given at the New School for Social Research, New York.] Unpublished manuscript. (1945) 1959 Productive Thinking. Enl. ed., edited by Michael Wertheimer. New York: Harper. H> Published posthumously. Contains a bibliography of Wertheimer's publications. Reprinted in 1961 by Tavistock. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
HEYTING, AREND 1956 Intuitionism. Amsterdam: NorthHolland Publishing. KATONA, GEORGE (1940)1949 Organizing and Memorizing: Studies in the Psychology of Learning and Teaching. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. KOHLER, WOLFGANG 1944 Max Wertheimer: 1880-1943. Psychological Review 51:143-146. LUCHINS, ABRAHAM S. 1942 Mechanization in Problem Solving: The Effect of Einstellung. Psychological Monographs 54, no. 6. LUCHINS, ABRAHAM S.; and LUCHINS, EDITH H. 1965 Logical Foundations of Mathematics for Behavioral Psychologists. New York: Holt. MADDEN, ED-WARD H. 1962 Philosophical Problems of Psychology. New York: Odyssey. MAYS, WOLFE 1959 The Philosophy of Whitehead. London: Allen & Unwin; New York: Macmillan. -» A paperback edition was published in 1962 by Collier. NEWMAN, EDWIN B. 1944 Max Wertheimer: 18801943. American Journal of Psychology 57:428-435. PRENTICE, W. C. H. 1959 The Systematic Psychology of Wolfgang Kohler. Volume 1, pages 427-455 in Sigmund Koch (editor). Psychology: A Study of a Science. New York: McGraw-Hill. WATSON, ROBERT I. 1963 Wertheimer: Gestalt Psychology. Pages 403-422 in Robert I. Watson, The Great Psychologists: From Aristotle to Freud. Philadelphia: Lippincott.
WEST, EDWARD Edward West (1782-1828), British economist, is remembered for having stated the principle of diminishing returns in the form and language made notable shortly after by Ricardo. As West said in his Essay on the Application of Capital to Land (1815, p. 2): "The principle is simply this, that in the progress of the improvement of cultivation the raising of rude produce becomes progressively more expensive, or, in other words, the ratio of the net produce of land to its gross produce is constantly diminishing." The gross produce is the value of total output, and the net is the gross minus the cost of production and exclusive of profit and rent.
527
In agriculture, according to West, output increases by diminishing amounts as the input of labor is increased by successive equal amounts, as is the input of capital, and as (a) the input of land is increased, also by successive equal amounts, but the land is of less fertility or (b) the input of land is constant. On assumption (a) the principle explains decreasing returns to scale by stating that as the input of all resources increases in a given proportion, the output of the product increases in lesser proportion. The reason is the decreased productivity of land. On assumption (£>) the principle resembles marginal productivity theory. The latter explains the relationship between output and changes in the input of a single resource while that of all others is constant. The reason for diminishing returns on assumption (2?) is that resources are imperfect substitutes. West seems not to have known that the principle, called the doctrine of rent, had already been stated in 1768 by Turgot and in 1777 by James Anderson. He rediscovered the principle when he undertook to correct Adam Smith's doctrine of rent and to explain the developments in agriculture during the Napoleonic Wars. Although the British had used more labor and capital on land and had brought more land into use, and the output of grain had thereby increased, yet the price of grain had risen. One reason was the increase in the money supply; the other was a rise in costs. West attributed these higher costs to diminishing returns. He used the idea of diminishing returns also to forecast a decline in per capita real income in Britain if the country did not increase its import of grain. (He was not, however, in favor of complete free trade.) If Britain were to continue to increase agricultural output, costs would rise and the returns to labor and capital decline. The reduction would be offset, but only in part, by increasing returns to manufacturing. The real income of landlords would increase because money rent would increase more than prices. Rent itself is the differential return (the net product after profit) on different grades of land; it increases as less fertile land is added. Actually West gave more to economics than his theory of rent. But his other ideas were not noticed and had to be rediscovered by later economists. From the principle of diminishing returns he deduced the proposition (made notable by Eli Heckscher in 1919) that international trade equalizes costs between countries, although he believed the proposition to be valid only for agricultural production. In The Price of Corn and Wages of Labour (1826), he said, or clearly implied, that price is
528
WESTERGAARD, HARALD
determined by supply and demand (rather than by the labor cost of production as the Ricardians contended); that each can be expressed as a schedule; that long run price equals average total cost and short run price may be as low as average variable cost; that supply changes as the number of firms does; that demand is affected by taste and money income, the latter depending on aggregate income and employment, which themselves are much influenced by the money supply; that the elasticity of demand determines how much price will change when supply changes; that wages and employment in a particular market are determined by the supply and demand for labor, the latter depending on the demand for the output of labor and the profit of employers; and that the wage level and total employment are determined by the state of the cycle. Rather than being a Ricardian before Ricardo himself, as he has been called, West was more nearly a Marshallian before Alfred Marshall and something of a twentieth-century macroeconomist. He was a lawyer by profession and wrote a standard work on the law of extents. He was sent to India as a judge in the court system that the crown maintained independently of the East India Company, which then governed the country. His decisions were notable for applying British justice to the treatment of natives, and he was continually in conflict with the company. Like other economists of his time, he was strongly influenced by Whig conceptions of individualism and civil liberty, and he was really more of a Ricardian in politics than in economics. WILLIAM D. GRAMPP [For the historical context of West's work, see the biography of RICARDO ; for discussion of the subsequent development of his ideas, see RENT and the biography of MARSHALL.] WORKS BY WEST (1815) 1934 Sir Edward West on the Application of Capital to Land. London: Roworth. -> First published as Essay on the Application of Capital to Land, With Observations Shewing the Impolicy of Any Great Restriction of the Importation of Corn . . . . 1817 A Treatise of the Law and Practise of Extents in Chief and in Aid. London: Butterworth. 1826 The Price of Corn and Wages of Labour, With Observations Upon Dr. Smith's, Mr. Ricardo's, and Mr. Malthus's Doctrines Upon Those Subjects. London: Hatchard. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY DREWITT, FREDERICK G. (1907) 1935 Bombay in the Days of George IV: Memoirs of Sir Edward West. 2d ed., rev. & enl. New York and London: Longmans. PLUMMER, ALFRED 1929 Sir Edward West: 1782-1828. Journal of Political Economy 37:573-582.
WESTERGAARD, HARALD Harald Ludvig Westergaard (1853-1936), Danish statistician, economist, and social reformer, exerted a strong influence on Danish statistics and social research for many years. He had been interested in pure mathematics from his youth, but after receiving an M.SC. degree in mathematics, he went on to study political economy and statistics. His first major work was an essay on a subject set by the University of Copenhagen: "Summary and Evaluation of the Recent Studies of the Death Rate in Different Classes of Society." The paper was much praised and was soon published in German as Die Lehre von der Mortalitdt und Morbilitat (1882). This comprehensive work proved the turning point in Westergaard's career and was one of the factors that secured him an appointment at the University of Copenhagen. The book attracted favorable notice both in Denmark and abroad and was for many years the standard manual for deathrate statistics. It deals with both theoretical and practical aspects of these statistics and contains a wealth of international statistical facts. Westergaard's characteristic and partly original approach appears for the first time in this work. This approach stresses the application of the law of errors—in connection with calculations of demographic frequencies (for example, death rates)—to the study of the appropriateness of the data and, at the same time, discusses the limitations caused by inadequacies in the data. These inadequacies can be exemplified by such insufficiencies in the census data as double counting, delayed recording of births and of deaths among newborns, and missing data on age of illiterates. Throughout his life Westergaard emphasized that for further development of scientific statistics the improvement of mathematical methods was less important than the attempt to procure better data (see, for example, 1916). The mathematical methods used by Westergaard in his 1882 book—for instance, his use of standard errors and of approximations by the normal distribution—were not new, but he was original in the way he adapted well-known principles of probability theory to his discussion of practical statistics. In 1883 he joined the University of Copenhagen as a lecturer in political science and the theory of statistics, the first to teach the latter subject at the university. He was made professor of political science in 1886, a position he retained until his retirement in 1924. Westergaard wrote well, and his textbooks in statistics, sociology, and political science were widely used in Denmark and abroad. Die Grund-
WESTERMARCK, EDWARD ziige der Theorie der Statistik (1890) developed the fundamental idea of using formal probability theory to analyze practical statistics. He was attracted by the Gaussian normal distribution, and his research was concentrated on demographic fields where this distribution is relevant and reasonable as a basic assumption. Although he was aware of the limitations of this approach, in his textbook on theory he urged the applied statistician to consider whether the absence of normality in a particular case might not simply reflect such inadequacies of the data as those discussed above. The Theorie was severely criticized for being incomplete in its proofs, for implicitly assuming proofs, and for avoiding problems. Westergaard himself recognized the limitations of his principle of making the normal distribution the keystone of all statistical work, but he did little to demonstrate the mathematical reasons for the limitations of this distribution. In an article published in 1918, "On the Future of Statistics," Westergaard, largely through an intuitive approach to mathematical statistics, demonstrated great clearsightedness about many problems that were not solved until much later. For example, he urged further work on testing statistical hypotheses from samples. However, the article is also permeated by his partiality toward normal distributions and his contempt for skewed distributions. He believed that the appearance of a nonnormal distribution is evidence of a failure to determine causality and that a closer study of single principal causes is profitable. After his retirement from the university Westergaard published Contributions to the History of Statistics (1932). A work of lasting value, it remains unique in its wealth of detail and its historical meticulousness. It shows how much statistical knowledge has increased, from its small beginnings in the seventeenth century to its considerable scope at the end of the nineteenth. Westergaard placed great emphasis on the need for causal analysis. In writing about the future of statistics he said: "The great problem in all science is to find the causality, to enable us to trace the causes of a given phenomenon and to foretell coming events, where the causes in action are known" (1918, p. 499); and he sought this kind of analysis in history no less than in statistics. Westergaard belongs to the generation of Pontus Fahlbeck, and there are striking similarities between them. Two influences were of primary importance for both: first, the work of Quetelet and, second, the rich flow of demographic data that began in the middle of the nineteenth century. At an early stage of their maturity Westergaard and
529
Fahlbeck witnessed the rapid progress made by Galton, Pearson, and others of the English statistical school, who stressed the development of the theoretical aspects of statistics, but neither of them was able to assimilate these modern trends. Instead, their attitude toward these developments was skeptical and negative—although Westergaard was the better informed and the less negative of the two. Faced with an uncongenial intellectual situation, Westergaard took up the historical studies that led to his masterful history of statistics. In addition to research and teaching, Westergaard was prominent in insurance, banking, and humanitarian activities. A quotation from one of his articles summarizes his philosophy: "Political economy is not solely based on facts and formal logical conclusions; it is closely connected with human interests, and consequently every theory is stamped by its author's philosophy" (1881, p. 1). KAI RANDER BUCH [Directly related are the entries MORTALITY; STATISTICS.] WORKS BY WESTERGAARD Sp0rgsmaalet om alderdomsfors0rgelse. National0konomisk tidsskrift 18:1—30. -» The extract in the text was translated by Kai Rander Buch. (1882) 1901 Die Lehre von der Mortalitdt und Morbilitdt. 2d ed. Jena (Germany): Fischer. 1890 Die Grundzilge der Theorie der Statistik. Jena (Germany): Fischer. 1916 Scope and Method of Statistics. American Statistical Association, Publications 15:225-276. 1918 On the Future of Statistics. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 81:499-520. 1932 Contributions to the History of Statistics. London: King. 1881
SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY Fortegnelse over et udvalg af Professor Harald Westergaards skrifter. 1937 National0konomisk tidsskrift 75:246-261. Harald Westergaard. 1937 Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 100:149-150. Harald Westergaard. 1943 Volume 25, pages 403-412 in Dansk biografisk leksikon. Copenhagen: Schultz. NYB0LLE, HANS C. 1937 Harald Westergaard: 19. April 1853-13. December 1936. Copenhagen, Universitet, Festskrift udg. af K0benhavns Universitet i anledning af universitets aarfest. [1937]: 136-144.
WESTERMARCK, EDWARD Edward Alexander Westermarck (1862-1939), sociologist and anthropologist (he was both a speculative, "armchair" anthropologist and a field worker), was born in Helsingfors [now Helsinki], Finland. He received his PH.D. from the University
530
WESTERMARCK, EDWARD
of Helsingfors in 1890, honorary LL.D.'S from the University of Aberdeen in 1912 and the University of Glasgow in 1929, and an honorary PH.D. from the University of Uppsala in 1932. He lectured on sociology at the University of London from 1904 to 1907 and professor of sociology there during each Easter term from 1907 to 1930. In 1890 he was appointed lecturer on sociology at the University of Helsingfors, and from 1906 to 1918 he was professor of moral philosophy there. He was the first head of the Abo Academy, from 1918 to 1921, and professor of philosophy there from 1918 to 1930. Among his prominent pupils in London were Bronislaw Malinowski, Morris Ginsberg, and G. C. Wheeler and, in Finland, Rafael Karsten and Gunnar Landtman. For Westermarck, "the object [of sociology is] to explain the social phenomena, to find their causes, to show how and why they have come into existence" (1908, pp. 24-25). He wrote many books on a variety of subjects but was principally interested in marriage, ethics, and religion. Westermarck's first book, The History of Human Marriage (1891), which had a foreword by Alfred Russel Wallace, was an enormous success and was translated into French, German, Swedish, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish. In 1921 the fifth edition was published, completely rewritten and enlarged to three volumes. To gather material for this book Westermarck supplemented his research at the British Museum by sending questionnaires to about 125 persons living among primitive peoples in different parts of the world. About one-fifth of those questioned— mostly English missionaries—replied. The diversity of the material he collected convinced him that it was possible to study all of mankind only by the comparative method. In his book, Westermarck criticized the then current theories of primitive promiscuity and ancient group-marriage. He rejected the hypothesis that primitive man lived in promiscuity and believed instead that monogamy was the original form of marriage. According to Westermarck, the nuclear family, as prefigured among the anthropoid apes, was the first and universal unit from which society developed. Marriage is rooted in the family rather than the family in marriage. The family is necessary for the survival of certain species because of the need for parental protection. The male stays with the female and the young to take care of them, and this is the result of instincts acquired through the process of natural selection. In 1926 Westermarck published A Short History of Marriage, which contained the theories he had
arrived at in his massive study, without the factual material. His hypothesis of incest is connected with his psychological explanation of the rules for exogamy. He traced the origin of exogamy to the lack of inclination for sexual intercourse between relatives (usually consanguineous relatives) who live very close together (1926a, p. 80). In such cases the very thought of the act leads to positive aversion, and this aversion displays itself in custom and law as a prohibition of intercourse between near kin. Westermarck's Three Essays on Sex and Marriage (1934a) may be considered a supplement to The History of Human Marriage. The first essay is a criticism of Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex and of infantile incestuous desire, the second contains theories of exogamy, and the third is a polemic against Robert Briffault, who had attacked Westermarck in his book The Mothers (1927). Westermarck's second, monumental book, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1906— 1908), has been considered his most important work. Convinced that moral judgments are ultimately based not on intellect but on emotions, he denied the objective validity of moral judgments. According to Westermarck, ethics is a psychological and sociological discipline, not a normative science. General moral truths do not exist. The object of scientific ethics is not to fix rules for human conduct but to investigate the phenomenon of moral consciousness. As in his work on marriage, Westermarck used the comparative method in his book on ethics. In collecting his material he started from the assumption that the moral ideas of people are most clearly expressed in their customs and laws. Another book, Ethical Relativity (1932a), stated his views on ethical subjectivism more explicitly. In his Early Beliefs and Their Social Influence (1932b) Westermarck discussed the influences that early religious and magical beliefs and practices have exerted upon social relationships and institutions. He asserted that blessings, curses, holiness, and ritual uncleanness belong to magic as well as to religion. A religion may include many practices of magical origin. In the ancient East, magic and religion were indissolubly mixed. Some of the impetus for Westermarck's Early Beliefs and Their Social Influence came from his field work in Morocco. In the course of more than thirty years he spent a total of nine years in Morocco studying the religious and magical ideas and rites of a single people. Four books and a posthumous article resulted from this field work. They include studies of marriage customs (1914), popu-
WHEWELL, WILLIAM lar religion and magic (1926k), pagan survivals (1933), and homicide (1947), as well as a collection of two thousand Moorish proverbs recorded as they were actually used in concrete situations (1930). HILMA GRANQVIST [See also ETHICS, article on ETHICAL SYSTEMS AND SOCIAL STRUCTURES; INCEST; KlNSHIP; MARRIAGE; SEXUAL BEHAVIOR, article on SOCIAL ASPECTS; and the biographies of BACHOFEN; MCLENNAN; MALINO wSKI; MARETT; MORGAN, LEWIS HENRY; RIVERS; TYLOR.] WORKS BY WESTERMARCK (1891) 1921 The History of Human Marriage. 5th ed. 3 vols. London: Macmillan. -> An expanded version of Westermarck's thesis, which was published in 1889. (1906-1908) 1924-1926 The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas. 2d ed. 2 vols. London: Macmillan. 1908 Sociology as a University Study. Pages 24-32 in London, University of, Inauguration of the Martin White Professorships of Sociology. London: Murray. 1914 Marriage Ceremonies in Morocco. London: Macmillan. 1920 The Belief in Spirits in Morocco. Acta Academiae Aboensis, Humaniora 1:1. Turku (Finland): The Academy. 1926a A Short History of Marriage. New York: Macmillan. -» Based on the fifth edition of The History of Human Marriage. An abridgement of A Short History of Marriage, entitled Marriage, was published in 1929 by Cape and Smith. 1926£> Ritual and Belief in Morocco. 2 vols. London: Macmillan. 1926c The Goodness of Gods. London: Watts. (1927) 1929 Memories of My Life. New York: Macaulay. -> First published in Swedish. 1930 Wit and Wisdom in Morocco: A Study of Native Proverbs. With the assistance of Shereef 'Abd-esSalam el-Baqqali. London: Routledge. 1932a Ethical Relativity. New York: Harcourt. -» A paperback edition was published in 1960 by Littlefield. 1932b Early Beliefs and Their Social Influence. London: Macmillan. 1933 Pagan Survivals in Mohammedan Civilisation. London: Macmillan. 1934a Three Essays on Sex and Marriage. London: Macmillan. 1934& Freuds teori om oedipuskomplexen i sociologisk belysning. Stockholm: Bonnier. 1936a The Future of Marriage in Western Civilisation. London: Macmillan. 1936& Methods in Social Anthropology. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 66:223-248. 1936c On Primitive Marriage. American Journal of Sociology 41:565-584. 1939 Christianity and Morals. New York: Macmillan. 1947 Customs Connected With Homicide in Morocco. Westermarck Society, Transactions 1:7-38. -> Published posthumously. SUPPLEMENTARY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BRIFFAULT, ROBERT 1927 The Mothers: A Study of the Origins of Sentiments and Institutions. 3 vols. London: Macmillan.
531
HIRN, YRJO 1946 Edward Westermarck and His English Friends. Westermarck Society, Transactions 1:39— 51. LAGERBORG, ROLF H. H. 1951 Edvard Westermarck och verken frdn hans verhstad under hans tolv sista drr 1927-1939. Helsinki: Holger Schildt. NUMELIN, R. 1941 Edward Westermarck and the Finnish Sociological School. Nord 4:268-282. TENKKU, Jussi 1962 Westermarck's Definition of the Concept of the Moral. Westermarck Society, Transactions, Vol. 9, no. 2. Turku (Finland): Munksgaard. TYLOR, EDWARD B.; and WALLACE, ALFRED R. 1940 Letters from Edward B. Tylor and Alfred Russel Wallace to Edward Westermarck. Edited, with introductory remarks concerning the publication of The History of Human Marriage, by K. R. V. Wikman. Acta Academiae Aboensis, Humaniora XIII, 7. Turku (Finland) The Academy. WIKMAN, KARL R. V. 1962 Edward Westermarck as Anthropologist and Sociologist. Memorial lecture to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of Edw. Westermarck's birthday, delivered at a meeting of the Westermarck Society held at Abo Akademi on November 20th, 1962. Westermarck Society, Transactions. Vol. 9, no. 1. Turku (Finland): Munksgaard.
WHEWELL, WILLIAM William Whewell (1794-1866), English mathematical economist, was born in Lancashire. He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and remained there as a fellow and tutor. In 1841 he was appointed master of the college. He served from 1828 to 1832 as professor of mineralogy and from 1838 to 1855 as professor of moral philosophy. Whewell was primarily a philosopher and a mathematician, and he published his major works in these fields. He was also, however, one of a small group of British authors, which included Samuel Turner, T. Perronet Thompson, Denis G. Lube, and the anonymous "E.R.," who made contributions to the early development of mathematical economics. Whewell's contribution was contained in a paper, "Mathematical Exposition of Some Doctrines of Political Economy," delivered before the Cambridge Philosophical Society in 1829. In this paper, he pointed out that some parts of the science of political economy could be presented in a more systematic and connected form, and also more clearly and simply, by the use of mathematical language. To illustrate his argument, Whewell used mathematics to discuss Ricardo's theory of the incidence of a tax on wages. Ricardo had argued against Adam Smith's view that a tax on wages would ultimately be borne by the employer of labor. Such a supposition, Ricardo asserted, would lead to the absurd conclusion that, as a rise in the prices of goods due to a rise in wages would again operate
532
WHITEHEAD, ALFRED NORTH
on wages, the action and reaction first of wages on goods and then of goods on wages would continue "without any assignable limits" (Ricardo [1817] 1962, p. 301). Whewell showed in his 1830 paper that if Ricardo had considered the mathematical implications of his theory, he would have found that a limitless rise in prices and wages was not only absurd but impossible. To demonstrate this, he assumed that wages would rise by the whole amount of the tax, which would be, say, V10. On the assumption that only a part, say y2, of the value of goods is wages, the rise in the price of manufactured goods would be i/2o. And on the assumption that only y> of the laborers' consumption is manufactured goods, the resulting rise in wages due to the rise in price would be 1/40, and so on. The whole rise in wages would then be
- -40
10
160 + '"
15
and the whole rise in the price of goods would be
1 . 1 . 1 20 80 320
15
Whewell concluded that as both these geometrical series have limits, Ricardo's argument about quantities with no assignable limits is not valid. A similar argument can be found in T. Perronet Thompson's An Exposition of Fallacies on Rent, Tithes, etc. (see 1826, pp. 39-40). Whewell also sought in his paper to make a distinction between the moral axioms of political economy and the conclusions that might be deduced from them, a task for which mathematics could be of considerable help. Using certain axioms as a foundation, Whewell discussed the difference between those who, following Ricardo, maintained that all taxes on the produce of land were ultimately paid by the consumer and those who maintained that most such taxes were paid by the landlord. He showed that the tax would fall solely on rent only in the absence of marginal soil. The existence of marginal soil, however, would mean that the tax would not only fall on rent but also lead to a diminution of the return on capital and an increase of price. In a second memoir to the Cambridge Philosophical Society in 1831, Whewell presented a mathematical exposition of Ricardo's doctrines and in a third memoir in 1850, an examination of questions of demand, supply, price, and international exchange. Whewell was more than a translator of existing doctrine into mathematical language, as he has
sometimes been described. His contributions to mathematical economics and, especially, his first approximation to a solution of the problem of the dynamic stability of equilibrium, in the discussion of the effect of a tax on wages, are really noteworthy. REGHINOS D. THEOCHARIS WORKS BY WHEWELL (1819) 1847 An Elementary Treatise on Mechanics. 7th ed. London: Whittaker. 1823 A Treatise on Dynamics, Containing a Considerable Collection of Mechanical Problems. Cambridge: Deighton. 1830 Mathematical Exposition of Some Doctrines of Political Economy. Cambridge Philosophical Society, Transactions 3:191-230. 1831 Mathematical Exposition of Some of the Leading Doctrines in Mr. Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. Cambridge Philosophical Society, Transactions 4:155-198. 1832 An Introduction to Dynamics, Containing the Laws of Motion and the First Three Sections of the Principia. Cambridge: Deighton. (1837) 1890 History of the Inductive Sciences, From the Earliest to the Present Time. 3d ed., with additions. New York: Appleton. (1840) 1847 The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded Upon Their History. 2 vols. A new edition, with corrections and additions, and an appendix containing philosophical essays previously published. London: Parker. 1850 Mathematical Exposition of Some Doctrines of Political Economy. Cambridge Philosophical Society, Transactions 9, part 1:128-149; part 2:1-7. SUPPLEMENTARY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
RICARDO, DAVID (1817) 1962 Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. London: Dent; New York: Dutton. -» A paperback edition was published in 1963 by Irwin. ROBERTSON, Ross M. 1949 Mathematical Economics Before Cournot. Journal of Political Economy 57:523536. SCHUMPETER, JOSEPH A. (1954) 1960 History of Economic Analysis. Edited by E. B. Schumpeter. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. THEOCHARIS, REGHINOS D. 1961 Early Developments in Mathematical Economics. London: Macmillan. THOMPSON, T. PERRONET (1826)1832 The True Theory of Rent, in Opposition to Mr. Ricardo and Others, Being an Exposition of Fallacies on Rent, Tithes, etc. 9th ed. London: Heward. -» First published as An Exposition of Fallacies on Rent, Tithes, etc. Containing an Examination of Mr. Ricardo's Theory of Rent. . . .
WHITEHEAD, ALFRED NORTH Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), British mathematician and philosopher, was born in Ramsgate, Kent, and educated at Sherborne School in Dorset and at Trinity College, Cambridge. After
WHITEHEAD, ALFRED NORTH reading for the mathematical tripos, he taught for a time at Cambridge. There he collaborated with his former pupil Bertrand Russell in work on the logical foundations of mathematics, which led to their joint authorship of Principia mathematica (1910-1913). In 1911 Whitehead went to London, where he held the chair of applied mathematics at the Imperial College of Science. While in London he wrote books which showed how certain ideas, given formal expression in his logical work, could be developed in a philosophy of physical science (see 1919; 1920; 1922). With the publication of Science and the Modern World in 1925, it became apparent that Whitehead was also developing a comprehensive philosophy with a strong emphasis on the history of science in relation to the history of civilization. In 1926 he became professor of philosophy at Harvard University and remained in Cambridge, Massachusetts, until his death. This article will be confined to an attempt to draw attention to aspects of his thought which are of particular interest for the social sciences. Whitehead had a strong propensity for nontechnical sociological reflection, and this shows itself throughout his work. It could indeed be said that his metaphysical views were formed by generalization from his views on human life in society as well as by generalization from certain logico-mathematical and scientific concepts, so that the wealth of social and historical illustration scattered throughout his books is an integral, and not merely an incidental, part of his thought. This interest began in his youth: he was the son of a country clergyman at a time when the Church of England was closely bound up with the life of the local community. The England of his boyhood was, he recalled, "guided by local men with strong mutual antagonisms and intimate community of feeling" (see Essays . . ., part 1, "Personal," p. 4). This gave him an appreciation for a society made up of individuals of strong and distinctive character within a local type, bound to each other by tacitly accepted ways of feeling rather than by explicitly held views. As a schoolboy at Sherborne, a small public school in the west of England, he was also in an environment where he could enjoy the sense of an inheritance from the past. At Sherborne he had a classical education in the Whig tradition of the time, from schoolmasters "who had read the classics with sufficient zeal to convert them to the principles of Athenian democracy and Roman tyrannicide" (ibid., pp. 33-34). Throughout his life Whitehead retained an interest in quoting widely from history, particularly from ancient history, by way of comparison and contrast with contemporary
533
ways of life. His method was not that of the critical, scientific historian, as he was the first to admit: he used history in accordance with what Burke called "the spirit of philosophic analogy"; and his illustrations must be read by historians and sociologists in that spirit. "Society" in Whitehead's philosophy In Whitehead's mature philosophy, the notion of "society" is generalized to become a key term. This is not to say that the only, or even the dominant, influence behind that philosophy is sociological. Certain new developments in physics had affected its formation; for instance, Whitehead recalled the excitement with which he first heard J. J. Thompson put forward the notion of the "flux of energy" in lectures on electrodynamics (see Whitehead 1933, p. 238): "Energy passes from particular occasion to particular occasion . . . with a quantitative flow and a definite direction." In his later philosophy, the "energy" of the physicist became an abstraction from the concrete transmission of "experiences" from one actual entity to another, these experiences having emotional tone as well as quantitative properties. Each actual entity was conceived of as an act of experience arising out of data, and the word "feeling" was used for "this basic operation" (1929, p. 55). Each actual entity constitutes itself from the way it "feels" the other actual entities in its environment. Whitehead's use of the word "feeling" here has often been criticized as giving a panpsychic, or perhaps a hylozoic, view of nature, and indeed it is hard to see how a notion whose primary meaning is psychological can be stretched, even in so reduced a sense, to apply to the constituents of what we would normally call "inorganic nature." When extended upward, however, to describe how a human being builds up his life out of the ways in which he responds to his social relationships, the notion is more plausible. These relationships are seen by Whitehead as more than external contacts, actions, and reactions. However difficult the notion, he did indeed hold that the transmission of energy in physical transactions is an abstraction from the transmission of "feelings" from one entity of nature to another, so that they are "re-enacted" in each successor in a route of entities. These routes, however, are seen not only as minuscule, but as of extremely brief duration. He described the smallest element in nature as known to physics—for instance, a fundamental particle—as not only a "route" but also a "society" of routes of actual entities. A route is a linear strand in which each successive member
534
WHITEHEAD, ALFRED NORTH
inherits from the preceding members. The strand will also exist within a "society" of other such strands, a "society" being a nexus of entities with a dominant characteristic arising from the ways in which these members are related to each other. It enjoys "social order" when a common element of form is displayed by each member in virtue of the conditions imposed on it by its relation to the others. It might be thought that here Whitehead was talking simply about the gestalt properties of ordered wholes and about systems in which certain properties of the parts are attributable to them only in their relation to other parts. Although formally this is so, he was also saying that these mutual conditioning characteristics result from an actual re-enactment of the experience of one entity in another. This notion of "mutual immanence" is harder to appreciate than is the correlative part of his view, by which any molecular entities of which we are aware, from molecules and cells to rocks, trees, our own bodies, and human social wholes are societies within societies of smaller entities, supporting one another in dynamic interactions within an ongoing process. An analogous view of nature, in which the key notion is that of ordered systems within wider systems, has been put forward as providing a possible synthesis for the physical sciences and the "life sciences" under the term general systems theory (see Bertalanffy 1949; General Systems), and attempts are being made to find a use for these notions in political theory and sociology. Natural laws and the social environment Whitehead saw the universe in the widest sense as characterized by very general topological relations called "extensive connection." These are relations of "overlapping," "whole and part," which underlie all the more specific forms of relationship. The particular forms of relationship which we call the laws of nature of our physical world are not universal. They are the most general patterns produced by the behavior of the dominant constituents of our "cosmic epoch" (which, as far as we know, are particles of matter with electromagnetic properties). But if the prevailing behavior patterns were to change—for instance, if there were increasing dominance of "living" over "nonliving" matter—so, too, there might be an emergence of new laws of nature. This "immanent" view of natural laws, as descriptive of dominant trends and as in principle modifiable as the trends are modified, may well be a plausible view of the character of social and economic "laws." The distinction be-
tween "immanent laws" and "imposed laws" is a notion which has been used to good effect (with explicit acknowledgment to Whitehead) by Charles P. Curtis (1954) in writing of the relations between a legal system and the aspects of the social morality it regulates. Curtis has suggested that it is probably only in this social context that immanent law and imposed law coexist and are not alternative doctrines of the status of laws. This notion of "immanent laws," dependent on the predominant characteristics and behavior of the entities, allows the possibility of local types of order in a particular region. It is on these lines that Whitehead approached the problem of "internal relations," a problem which also concerns sociologists (see Homans 1950, p. 9). Homans has referred approvingly to Whitehead's view. If everything is integrally related to everything else, how can one make true statements about anything without taking its whole context into account? Whitehead's answer (1926, pp. 235, 239) is to distinguish the general background of relationship from the multiplicity of limited subpatterns, any one of which may be analyzed without having to take account of all the others, some of which may be of negligible degrees of relevance. Moreover, an actual entity or "society" of entities responds to its environment according to what is relevant to its own dominant needs and interests. This recognition that responses are made selectively to a perspective of the environment, rather than to the environment in its totality, is becoming a commonplace in sociological literature and has been especially discussed under the notion of the "image" (see Boorstin 1961 for the widespread implications of this notion; and Simon [1947-1956] 1957, pp. 196ff. ; [1947] 1961, pp. 137 ff., on "bounded rationality"). Chester Barnard (1938, pp. 194 ff. in the 1948 edition) noted the importance of the concept of selective response to an environment in connection with his analysis of decisions made in organizations and acknowledged his debt to Whitehead's Process and Reality (1929), both for the concept and for the form of its expression. The concept includes the notion that the objective environment of a decision includes the purpose of the organization that results from previous decisions, and the notion of the environment as social as well as physical and as ordered selectively with reference to the purpose, this factor or that being selected as pertinent, relevant, or interesting. Nevertheless, there may be actual but ignored features of the total environment which can affect the purpose either favorably or adversely. Whitehead discussed this contrast between the
WHITEHEAD, ALFRED NORTH total environment and the environment as selectively grasped (see Adventures of Ideas 1933, pp. 268-282). Human society and its institutions Every "society," therefore, lives in an environment selectively discriminated; and the discrimination depends largely on instinctive needs, "feelings," and, in a very general sense, valuations. This is a fortiori the case for societies in the ordinary sense of human society. The dispositions and interests which underlie selective responses are derived largely from the society's own past, so that the members of every society have intuitively shared and inherited ways of feeling, shaping not only their values but also their habits of behavior. In Adventures of Ideas and Modes of Thought (1938) Whitehead discussed the conditions under which a new idea can modify socially inherited values and modes of behavior and can be an instrument in the transition to a new kind of social order. He noted how any idea arises in an environment of repetitive natural and social processes, "senseless agencies" not under rational control. The new idea is not likely to be efficacious unless it becomes united with ways of feeling which can be widely shared and which will be reflected in symbolic and practical, as well as in intellectual, forms of expression. In Symbolism (1927) Whitehead wrote of the social importance of symbolism, including language and ritual, in heightening the significance of shared ways of feeling by delineating them through expression; and he thought the stability of a society needed the invocation of commonly shared symbols. He noted the contribution that is made by religion, especially in its ritual form, in adding zest and a sense of importance to the occasions of social existence; but he insisted that as religion becomes both more rationalized and more generalized, it is not merely a social factor —it is concerned with an individual's own response to the universe beyond himself (1926). In noting limitations on the chances of an idea's being entertained, understood, or acted upon except in a favorable climate of opinion, which depends on modes of feeling and interest as well as on intellectual conditions, Whitehead showed he was aware of some of the considerations which go under the term "sociology of knowledge." In Science and the Modern World (1925) he traced the interplay between aesthetic and religious interests, general ideas, practical needs, and social institutions in the rise of modern science. A dominant style of thinking depends on a dominant mode of interest,
535
especially among the educated classes. Thus, history may be written from a religious or a political viewpoint, or from an interest in establishing hard matter of fact. The Greeks were interested mainly in dramatic views of the world, the Romans in legal forms of order; and neither of these represented the combination of interest in general principles and detailed observation of facts necessary for the scientific outlook. This combination was achieved in an amateur way by the philosophers and mathematicians of the seventeenth century— "the century of genius"—but it did not change the face of civilization until the nineteenth century, when it was combined with the growth of technology, in an "age of invention/' This needed a relatively prosperous middle class producing a succession of professionals who transmitted training in specialized techniques, especially through establishments such as the technological institutes in Germany. In contemporary society Whitehead saw large organizations, especially professional organizations, as the factors determining the predominant type of social order, and he thought the quality of society depended largely on the kinds of ideas and purposes entertained by those who are influential in such organizations (1931; 1933, pp. 174 ff.). He saw the main stream of ability as canalized in professional specialties, rather than going into central direction and into producing general coordinating ideas, and he feared that this might make for a narrowing of imaginative powers. In The Aims of Education (1917-1922), he noted as a tragedy of youth the way in which the achievement of professional and technical expertise can stifle zest and the capacity for aesthetic enjoyment. Whitehead saw the universe as a pluralistic society of societies, never static but always in process, and human societies as signal illustrations of this wider view. The members of each society derive their qualities through integral relationships with each other, and these relationships define the dominant type of social order. Yet there is also the possibility of the transition to new types of order, and these can originate in new emphases of interests and valuations of what is seen as important, heightened through intellectual and aesthetic expression and stemming from the creative powers of individual thinkers, artists, and reformers. Nevertheless, ideas and reforms become socially efficacious only through the subtle interplay of mutually supporting factors, and finally through being given appropriate embodiment in institutions. At the same time, Whitehead warned that we fall into the
536
WHORF, BENJAMIN L.
"fallacy of misplaced concreteness" (Whitehead's own term for a tendency against which his whole philosophy is a struggle) if we think, except for limited theoretical purposes, of "institutions"—or, indeed, of "laws," "trends," "forces"—as though these have an independent existence apart from the actual relationships of the actual individuals in the societies, whose large-scale patterns such words describe. This goes also for the society of the whole universe. DOROTHY EMMET [Directly related is the entry SYSTEMS ANALYSIS, articles on GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY and SOCIAL SYSTEMS. Other relevant material may be found in SCIENCE, article on THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE; and in the biography of BARNARD.] WORKS BY WHITEHEAD
(1910-1913) 1959-1960 WHITEHEAD, ALFRED NORTH; and RUSSELL, BERTRAND Principia mathematica. 2d ed. 3 vols. Cambridge Univ. Press. -> An abridged paperback edition of Volume 1 was published in 1962. (1917-1922) 1959 The Aims of Education, and Other Essays. New York: Macmillan; London: Benn. -> A paperback edition was published in 1949 and reprinted in 1956 by New American Library. (1919) 1925 An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge. 2d ed. Cambridge Univ. Press. (1920) 1959 The Concept of Nature. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press. 1922 Principle of Relativity With Applications to Physical Science. Cambridge Univ. Press. (1925) 1960 Science and the Modern World: Lowell Lectures, 1925. New York: Macmillan. -^ A paperback edition was published in 1960 by New American Library. (1926) 1954 Religion in the Making: Lowell Lectures, 1926. New York: Macmillan. -» A paperback edition was published in 1960 by Meridian. (1927) 1958 Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect. New York: Macmillan. -> A paperback edition was published in 1959 by Capricorn. (1929) 1960 Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. New York: Macmillan. -> A paperback edition was published in 1960 by Harper. 1931 On Foresight. Pages xi-xxix in Wallace B. Donham, Business Adrift. New York: McGraw-Hill. 1933 Adventures of Ideas. New York: Macmillan. -» A paperback edition was published in 1962 by New American Library. (1938) 1956 Modes of Thought: Six Lectures Delivered in Wellesley College, Massachusetts, and Two Lectures in the University of Chicago. New York: Macmillan. -» A paperback edition was published in 1958 by Capricorn. Essays in Science and Philosophy. New York: Philosophical Library, 1947. -> Contains essays originally published between 1912 and 1941. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
BARNARD, CHESTER I. (1938) 1962 The Functions of the Executive. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. BERTALANFFY, LUDWIG VON (1949) 1960 Problems of Life: An Evaluation of Modern Biological Thought.
New York: Harper. -> First published as Das biologische Weltbild, Volume 1. BOORSTIN, DANIEL 1961 The Image. New York: Atheneum. CURTIS, CHARLES P. 1954 It's Your Law. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. General Systems. -> Yearbook of the Society for the Advancement of General Systems Theory. Published since 1956. HOMANS, GEORGE C. 1950 The Human Group. New York: Harcourt. LOWE, VICTOR 1962 Understanding Whitehead. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. SCHILPP, PAUL A. (editor) (1941)1951 The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. 2d ed. New York: Tudor. -> Contains a comprehensive bibliography of Whitehead's works. SIMON, HERBERT A. (1947) 1961 Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-making Processes in Administrative Organization. 2d ed. New York: Macmillan. -> A paperback edition was published in 1965 by the Free Press. SIMON, HERBERT A. (1947-1956) 1957 Models of Man; Social and Rational: Mathematical Essays on Rational Human Behavior in a Social Setting. New York: Wiley.
WHORF, BENJAMIN L. It was the special merit of Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941) that he was able to regroup the ideas of his predecessors and teachers, especially Edward Sapir, into expressions of such cogency that they are remembered by a single phrase: language and culture. Whorf's monument, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, can be stated as follows: Language is culture, culture is stated in language; language mediates action, action is described in language. Accordingly, cultures, as systems of behavior, have their being in and are known from the ideas that man forms concerning the universe about him. Man's ideas about the universe consist of what he says about it when talking to himself; he talks to himself in the language he learns from those who nurture and teach him. When man talks to his fellows, he is uttering the ideas that he formed by talking to himself. These utterances impel those who listen to engage in culturally approved actions; the actions are the behavior of the society whose culture was being talked about. The pathways from language to culture and from culture to language, from culture to social behavior and from social behavior to culture, form closed circles, and movement along these pathways is constant. Whorf lived his early life in the town of his birth, Winthrop, Massachusetts, attending the public schools there. After graduating from high school, he went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he did not stand out as a student.
WHORF, BENJAMIN L. Not long after his graduation as a chemical engineer, he became a trainee in fire prevention engineering at the Hartford Fire Insurance Company. He became highly skilled in this specialty, and at the end of his life he was an assistant secretary of the company. He achieved such eminence in his field that he felt it would be economically impossible for him to leave his job for an academic post. Whorf's parents were New Englanders, of old families. His accent—eastern Massachusetts unspoiled by the now ubiquitous "general American"— was a pleasure to listen to (an article he wrote, describing it in part, appeared in 1943). His background contained many factors that may help account for his unusual dual career. He talked often of sea captain ancestors who sailed to exotic lands (the sea captains may have been apocryphal, but the lands beckoned); his father was a man of many talents and no one profession, a man of intellect and wide reading; Whorf possessed a deep sense of wonder at the mystery of the universe, probably derived from his religious mother, though he did not subscribe to any narrow creed; he had a technical education which enabled him to earn an excellent living, but which challenged him to look beyond materials and artifacts to the worlds that gave them life. Whorf began in his late twenties to study Hebrew: believing that the Bible contained some of the noblest words ever uttered by man, he hoped to gain a new understanding of these words that would cause them to confirm the science that he also believed in. After this early intellectual venture, he found in Hartford a library well endowed with anthropological works and became actively interested in the languages and peoples of Mexico. Whorf began to correspond with scholars in the field of Mexican archeology and general anthropology, and by 1929 he had read his first learned paper to an anthropological audience. It was shortly thereafter that Whorf received a Social Science Research Council fellowship. He was supported because his way of looking at problems was new and different from the ways of traditional scholarship and probably also because there was a feeling among social scientists even then that a man trained in the physical sciences could do things better. He went to Mexico, collected field data on an Aztec dialect, and began serious study of the Maya language and writing system. Whorf's contributions to the deciphering of the Maya writing system were incorrect in themselves, but the method he pursued and his insistence that what was being decoded was a system for writing a language (and not a mathematical code, or the
537
like) have proved to be right and have led to the beginning of actual deciphering of the texts by the Russian Knorozov (1955). In 1931 Whorf enrolled in a course with Sapir, who had just been appointed Sterling professor of anthropology at Yale. This was the beginning of Whorfs frequent and systematic contact with the linguists and anthropologists then at Yale. Before this period, he had been self-taught; his attempts at Biblical exegesis and at a kind of word magic now appear totally unscientific, but through them ran the idea—the "talking to himself"—that the way man talks about the universe is his only way of knowing anything about it. Studying Aztec and then Maya had made it clear to Whorf that his approach was right: an Aztec had Aztec ideas about the world, an ancient Hebrew had Hebrew ideas, a self-taught New Englander had New England ideas. They all talk about reality, but to each, reality is what he can talk about in his own language. When Whorf came into contact with Sapir, he found that his notion that the nature of reality is discoverable in language was not entirely original. Sapir had stated the basic premise (a succinct version appears in his 1933 article "Language") and philosophers before him had had glimmerings of it. Sapir and Whorf were alike in their awareness of the wonder of language and of how essential it is to man's existence as man. Sapir strengthened Whorf's technical knowledge of linguistics and enthusiastically encouraged him to pursue his own special kinds of insights; Whorf for his part recognized that technical knowledge would validate his linguistic theories. In 1932 Whorf began to study Hopi, and in his papers analyzing the Hopi language and the way it talks about the universe the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis found its fullest expression and came to the attention of anthropological theorists. Others have since written papers discussing ideas similar to Whorf's, but during the 1930s, when Whorf was writing, no one else produced anything as exact and documented as his studies. A decade after Whorf's death there was a resurgence of interest in his ideas, and in 1953 a conference was held to discuss them (see Hoijer 1954). In 1958 a symposium on Whorf's work was held at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association (see "Operational Models . . ." 1959). His continuing influence derives from the basic truth and value of his "trivial" assertion— that language is culture and that culture is controlled by and controls language. GEORGE L. TRACER
538 [See
WICKSELL, KNUT also COGNITIVE THEORY; LANGUAGE, article on
LANGUAGE AND CULTURE; LINGUISTICS, article OH
THE FIELD; and SAUSSURE.]
the biographies of SAPIR
and
WORKS BY WHORF 1943
Phonemic Analysis of the English of Eastern Massachusetts. Studies in Linguistics 2:21-40. -» See pages 41-44 for a commentary by George L. Trager. Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings. Edited and with an introduction by John B. Carroll. Cambridge, Mass.: Technology Press of M.I.T., 1956. -> Contains writings first published between 1927 and 1941. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
HOIJER, HARRY (editor) (1954) 1958 Language in Culture: Conference on the Interrelations of Language and Other Aspects of Culture. Univ. of Chicago Press. KNOROZOV, IURII V. 1955 Sistema pis'ma drevnikh maiia (The System of Writing of the Ancient Mayans). Moscow: Akademiia Nauk. Operational Models in Synchronic Linguistics: A Symposium. 1959 Anthropological Linguistics 1, no. 1. -» See pages 31-35, "The Systematization of the Whorf Hypothesis," by George L. Trager. SAPIR, EDWARD 1933 Language. Volume 9, pages 155168 in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences. New York: Macmillan.
WICKSELL, KNUT Knut Wicksell (1851-1926), Swedish economist, was born in Stockholm. He made an important contribution to the marginalist theory of price and distribution with Value, Capital and Rent (1893) and emerged as a pioneer in monetary theory with Interest and Prices (1898). His final statement of his views on price and distribution theory and on monetary theory appeared in the two-volume Lectures on Political Economy (1901-1906). Wicksell was intensely engaged in the political issues of his time. Although on the whole he was a believer in private enterprise, he strongly advocated economic and social reform. He wrote a number of articles and pamphlets that advocated policies of public finance designed to create a more equitable distribution of income and wealth; an active banking policy to safeguard the value of money; a Neo-Malthusian population policy; and an active social policy to mitigate the hardships brought about by industrialization. Wicksell also took an active part in many of the radical movements of the late nineteenth century. His support of such causes as free speech, the extension of suffrage, women's rights, antimonarchism, atheism, disarmament, and the appeasement of Russia held him back in his academic career but also led to an isolation that proved con-
ducive to the theoretical work for which he was singularly gifted. Both in his outspoken radicalism and in the originality of his thinking Wicksell resembled the American economist Thorstein Veblen. But he differed from Veblen in that his theoretical contributions became part of the mainstream of further scientific development and in that his ideas for social and economic reform anticipated a great deal of contemporary thought in the Western world. Family background and education Wicksell came from a commercial, middle-class background. His father, who had been raised on a small farm in the vicinity of Stockholm and who started as a shop assistant in the grocery trade, had by the late 1830s set up his own store, catering mostly to workers. His mother came from a Hungarian family that had immigrated to Sweden at the beginning of the century and set up a small silk-manufacturing firm in the capital. Wicksell's family enjoyed such cultural interests as literature and music; it gave him a liberal and intellectual orientation that was shared by his circle of friends during his high school years in the late 1860s. There was no strong religious sentiment in Wicksell's home, but when he was being prepared for confirmation and came under the influence of a pietistic pastor, he was converted. Reminiscing about this conversion, he wrote: "It was a deeply repentant, dreadfully guilt-laden sinner of just over fifteen, who crept up to the communion table on Palm Sunday 1867, to beg for a share in the virtue of Christ." During the first years of his university studies in Uppsala, where, as he wrote, he went "with a view to becoming a doctor of philosophy and university lecturer and perhaps even a professor of mathematics," his life was dominated by his newly won religious views, and in a spirit of austerity he concentrated on his studies in mathematics and physics. By 1874, however, he was beset by religious doubts. Under the influence of rationalist thinkers such as Darwin, Renan, Strauss, and Ibsen, he reconsidered his faith and became a freethinker. His personal conduct now became more worldly, but he kept up the pace of his studies and was able to obtain his licentiate degree, with mathematics as his major subject, in 1876. Transition to economics After leaving the university, Wicksell entered a period of indecision about his career. His difficulties in concentrating on further studies in mathematics arose partly from a general tendency
WICKSELL, KNUT to vacillate and partly from a growing interest in a wider range of social and cultural events. During his later university years he referred in several letters to a statement that Lagrange once made about the study of mathematics—"the mine is too deep" —and looking back on his academic studies in an autobiographical sketch, published in a Swedish journal, Fritankaren, in 1890, he complained about lacking "the perseverance and all-absorbing interest needed to produce something of real worth in a highly developed field like natural sciences." The mine about which Lagrange had spoken had, he added, "not become shallower since, and to be an independent scientist nowadays one must renounce almost everything else and be content to remain ignorant of almost every sphere of knowledge except the most relevant—to be a child in political and social life." During the late 1870s, Wicksell's interests widened, diverting him from serious academic work. Influenced by the writings of John Stuart Mill, Ibsen, Bjornson, and Strindberg, he began to take an active part in student life and pleaded, mostly in poetry, for freedom of thought and the emancipation of women. It was in this context that Wicksell and a new friend, the physiologist Hjalmar Ohrvall, came to study a massive Neo-Malthusian work—The Elements of Social Science, or Physical, Sexual and Natural Religion: An Exposition of the True Cause and Only Cure of the Three Primary Social Evils, Poverty, Prostitution and Celibacy. Written by George Drysdale, a young Scottish doctor, this work was published anonymously in 1854, went through 35 English editions, and was translated into ten languages. In Sweden the translation appeared in three editions between 1879 and 1885, enjoyed a succes de scandale—and brought Wicksell and his radical friends in close touch with Neo-Malthusianism and classical economics. Early in 1880, inspired by Drysdale's book, Wicksell volunteered to lecture on the causes of drunkenness at one of the meetings of an Uppsala temperance lodge. His lecture, first given to the horrified members of the lodge and then repeated to a large audience of students and university teachers, pointed to overpopulation as the root of all social evil. Wicksell asserted that among the lower classes drunkenness was caused by poverty, whereas among the educated, drunkenness could be attributed to the pressures created by the economic impossibility of early marriage and the ensuing "terrible" choice between celibacy and prostitution. Both evils could be overcome by checking the birth rate. To the "moral restraint" that Malthus
539
had indicated as one of the main checks, the use of contraceptives had been added by nineteenthcentury English reformers such as Place, Carlyle, Bradlaugh, and Besant; and Wicksell's lecture ended with a practical suggestion for the establishment of societies, among the laboring classes as well as among the students, whose members would pledge themselves to limit the procreation of children by contraception. The lecture was greeted with enthusiasm by the student world, and its message became part of the program of the radical "Eighties school," which was taking form in the Scandinavian countries. Most of the professors at the University of Uppsala, however, considered Wicksell's lecture "immoral," and following a protest from the Uppsala Medical Association, the University Council censured the young lecturer and warned him that further activities of this kind would lead to dismissal. For at least ten years, roughly the 1880s, Wicksell was torn between a longing for the scientific career he had originally chosen and a growing desire to devote himself to the study and propagation of Neo-Malthusianism. It was not until the 1890s that he recognized theoretical economics as a field giving scope to both these impulses. In 1885 a small inheritance made it possible for him to go to England for the academic year. In London he spent his evenings in the company of left-wing reformers but his days were spent at the British Museum, reading not only classical economics but also the works of such modern analysts as Jevons and Walras. Yet the more general problems of utilitarian ethics and social reform continued to be his main preoccupation, and when, with the help of a foundation grant, he went to London a second time in 1887, he did not study economics but spent his time in the company of such reformers as Drysdale, Bradlaugh, Besant, and Kautsky. His journeys took him to Strasbourg and Vienna, where he listened to lectures by such economists as Knapp, Brentano, and Menger. He got little out of these lectures, however, and his thoughts continually turned to matters of politics and social philosophy. In the fall of 1888 Wicksell arrived in Berlin. One day early in 1889 he happened to see the newly published second part of Bohm-Bawerk's Capital and Interest in a local bookshop window. It was this book that definitely turned his thoughts to theoretical economics. As he wrote in a letter to his friend Ohrvall: I procured a copy and was soon lost in the book. I understood much of it rather imperfectly, as can be seen from my notes in the margin. The last section, "Die Hohe des Kapitalzinses," in particular, I was able to
540
WICKSELL, KNUT
assimilate only partially, although later I came to appreciate it more than all the rest. Nonetheless the book came to me as a revelation. . . . It was as though I now saw with my own eyes the roof being put on a scientific edifice that no economist since the days of Ricardo had managed to raise above its lower floors, using even at best building materials of uneven quality.
Early career as an economist In 1888, Wicksell had applied for a lectureship in economics at the University of Stockholm, but the post had gone to a man holding less embarrassing views. After his discovery of Bohm-Bawerk, he returned to Stockholm and applied once more to the university, this time for permission to give a series of lectures on the theory of value. Again he was refused—the university depended on the City Council financially, and the rector was afraid to endanger amicable relations with the council by supporting a radical. Wicksell, therefore, had to deliver his lectures before the Workers' Association. While his four lectures on marginal analysis were quite naturally incomprehensible to an audience of workers, they were to constitute the introduction to the treatise on value and capital that Wicksell published in 1893. Although Wicksell's interest in economic analysis had now been seriously aroused, there were still many difficulties to be overcome before he could devote himself to scientific work. His marriage to a Norwegian schoolteacher in 1889 had in one way brought him peace and made his "enthusiasm for work grow considerably." But the form of the marriage—they were "united" without any religious or civil formalities—was to add to his reputation for extreme radicalism, and the birth of two children during the early years of the marriage contributed to his material difficulties. As no teaching post in economics was available, Wicksell had to make a living as an unattached lecturer, journalist, and pamphleteer, falling back on the old utilitarian themes of the 1870s and 1880s. However, even in Wicksell's popular lectures and articles, economic problems were beginning to occupy an increasingly important place. In 1891 he had taken part in an essay competition on the population problem, sponsored by the French Academic des Sciences Morales et Politiques. In spite of the fact that the academy obviously had wanted an exposition of a policy for encouraging population growth (so that the French population might match the growing German population), Wicksell was awarded one of the minor prizes—which was accompanied by many appreciative comments from the French economist Emile Levasseur—for his close-knit demonstration, written in French, of the Malthusian case.
Wicksell did not accept the mathematics of Malthus' population theory, especially the Malthusian idea that subsistence increases in an arithmetic ratio and population in a geometric ratio; he argued that it was in his formulation of the theory of rent and in the idea of diminishing marginal return to an increasing labor force that Malthus had identified the essence of the population problem. The marginal approach to economic theory, which Wicksell had gradually learned during the 1880s, also influenced his analysis of the problem of the normal working day. This problem had been brought to the forefront in the early 1890s by the international socialist movement. In several lectures and articles, Wicksell demonstrated by means of a marginal productivity model that the final economic result of shorter working hours was likely to be a decrease in wages. A real improvement in workers' incomes, rather than the apparent one that the reduction of working hours produced, could be achieved by a decrease in population. His open criticism of the main plank of the socialist platform of that time made him lose the little popularity he had among the workers of Stockholm. Politically isolated from the left as well as from the right, Wicksell was gradually driven back on his theoretical interests. In 1891 and 1892 he had written about seventy articles on political subjects, but in 1893 he produced only about twenty such articles. With the help of a small research grant he now began to concentrate on his work on the theory of value. In the autumn of 1892 he finished one part of the work and had it published separately under the title "Kapitalzins und Arbeitslohn" ("Interest and Wages") in the Jahrbucher fur Nationalokonomie und Statistik. A year later the book Value, Capital and Rent was published, and he soon received the first signs of recognition in letters of thanks from Bohm-Bawerk and Walras. That autumn, Wicksell became determined to give up journalism altogether and devote himself to science. In a Christmas letter to a friend, he wrote: "It is perhaps rash of me to have given up all newspaper writing, which more or less feeds us, and to live only for science and on credit. But I have a feeling that it is now or never." Further contributions to economic theory With his Value, Capital and Rent, Wicksell had made a major, if somewhat late, contribution to the marginalist theory of price and distribution by integrating capital, a productive factor with a time dimension, into the Walrasian theoretical framework. Normally, such a work would have been submitted as a doctoral thesis, but as the two or three
WICKSELL, KNOT economists active in Sweden in those days had only the most elementary notions of marginalist theory and were quite incapable of following Wicksell's mathematical presentation, he had to choose a different subject for his thesis. While he was working on his theoretical study, he had become interested in the problems of taxation and had published two pamphlets in the field of public finance. In a letter written to a friend during the summer of 1894 he said: "I am glad you liked my pamphlet. I have recently published another similar one . . . and now I shall set to work on my larger book covering the whole subject of taxes, for which I am receiving a grant from the Loren Foundation. When I delve into the details of the taxation system, I am truly shocked to see how confoundedly unfair it is to the little man—almost more than it used to be." After two years of industrious work, Wicksell produced a book in Swedish on the problem of the incidence of taxation, which was submitted as a doctoral thesis at the University of Uppsala in the spring of 1895. It was followed by a second volume centered on the problems of just taxation. This work was published in Germany under the title Finanztheoretische Untersuchungen nebst Darstellung und Kritik des Steuerwesens Schwedens (1896). As he had also passed the required oral examination in economics and public finance in the meantime, he began to make inquiries about a docentship, which in Sweden is the first step toward a chair for anyone whose thesis has been awarded honors. Economics was then taught only in the law faculties in Sweden, and in order to get a docentship in the arts faculty of his old university, Wicksell had to petition the king for a special dispensation. His petition was refused on the recommendation of the faculty, which suggested that he apply to the faculty of law instead. There too his application was turned down, ostensibly because he had no knowledge of law. During the debates in both faculties, conservative members had made disparaging references to Wicksell's popular lectures and to the "unethical" views he had propagated. When, a few months later, he tried his luck with the University of Stockholm, where economics was being established as a subject, he met with the same negative response, obviously for the same reasons. It had now become clear that nothing less than a full law degree would satisfy the authorities. Uppsala was the nearest university that offered such a degree, so in the autumn of 1897 Wicksell and his family moved there. At the age of 45, with no means of livelihood, he had to settle down to cram for an examination that normally required
547
a course of study lasting four years. The very traits of character—independence and stubbornness— that had involved him in so many material difficulties now stood him in good stead. For a period of two years he plowed his way through countless law compendia, in which he had but little interest. He took his last law examination in April 1899 and a few weeks later was confirmed as decent in economics and taxation law at the University of Uppsala. In the four years between completing his doctoral dissertation and obtaining his law degree, Wicksell had not been entirely inactive in the field of theoretical economics, despite his cramming in law and his perennial popular writing (which had become more and more orientated toward economic subjects). By the middle of the 1890s his theoretical thinking had turned toward a new subject, the theory of money. He had previously been concerned with the problem of overproduction, of Malthus' "general glut"; this earlier concern may explain why he now set out to clarify the problem of variability in general prices, approaching it from the point of view that changes in the value of money are interrelated with variations in the volume of credit and in business activity. It was on this problem that he worked—assisted by new grants from the Loren Foundation—during the greater part of 1896 and 1897. In 1898 his Geldzins und Guterpreise was published. With his Geldzins und Giiterpreise Wicksell made a major contribution to economic science. The central problem of monetary theory—the causes of the variability of general commodity prices—is for the first time clearly defined, and the shortcomings of such earlier explanations as the production cost theory and the formal quantity theory are demonstrated with great thoroughness. His own contribution was to show that the relationship of the money rate of interest to the natural, or real, rate of interest on capital is of decisive importance for changes in the price level. The idea that variations in credit, and thereby in the price level, arise when the money rate deviates from some sort of equilibrium rate had appeared earlier in English writings, notably in an essay and two parliamentary speeches by Henry Thornton in 1802 and 1811 and in a short passage in Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy and Taxation in 1817. It is, however, unlikely that Wicksell knew of these precursors at the time he was working on his treatise; he seems to have found out about them after the turn of the century, when he was going over the ground again in order to publish a textbook. In any case, his theory of the relationship between a money rate
542
WICKSELL, KNUT
and a natural rate was only a starting point for a further analysis of the cumulative economic process. In this respect his treatise goes deeper and is more detailed than any previous work on the subject, and it has given rise to a new treatment of the entire dynamic problem in economics. In an appreciation of Wicksell's work, G. L. S. Shackle (1959) said that it was Wicksell's Geldzins und Guterpreise that made him perhaps the chief forerunner and prophet of modern monetary theory, introducing as it did certain fundamental ideas a whole generation before anyone else realized their significance. Because of its originality, however, the book was not received with much enthusiasm or even understanding when it appeared. In the Swedish and Danish economic journals the reviews were remarkably ungenerous, and in Germany it was not reviewed at all. Wicksell had hoped that the practical banking world in Sweden would respond with interest to a dynamic theory of credit, business fluctuations, and prices, but he heard nothing from that quarter. When he presented his theory to the Swedish Economic Association, the forum for bankers and businessmen with more general economic interests, none of those present had anything to say. The only consolation was that the Economic Journal, which in a supercilious article a few years earlier had dealt summarily with Wicksell's book on price theory, now printed a warmly appreciative review of his new work. The reviewer even went so far as to suggest that the book be translated into English. Had the suggestion been followed then, instead of nearly forty years later, international monetary theory would almost certainly have advanced more rapidly. In 1899 the creation of an associate professorship in economics and public finance at the University of Lund gave Wicksell his first chance for a chair. He was appointed provisionally to this professorship, and it was understood that he would later apply for the permanent post in open competition. He moved to Lund and took up his teaching duties in January 1900, working on his initial lectures with special care, since he was preparing the ground for his two-volume textbook, Lectures on Political Economy (1901-1906). This book has been called "a textbook for professors," containing as it does a rigorous systematic contribution to price and distribution theory as well as to monetary theory. When Wicksell did apply for the associate professorship in 1900, Gustav Cassel, who was only starting on his career as an economist, was a fellow applicant. Of the three judges, two placed Wicksell
first. The judge who favored Cassel, a Danish professor, attacked Wicksell's deductive mathematical method (which Cassel was not as yet using) and declared that he put more faith in Cassel as a teacher, claiming he was "better suited than Wicksell to give guidance to the young, particularly to future holders of public office." In the Higher University Council the majority of the professors supported Wicksell, whereupon Cassel withdrew his application. At this stage, Wicksell's election would normally have needed only formal confirmation. But the vice chancellor, Bishop Gottfrid Billing, opposed the expected appointment; he declared that he could not accept the existing statutory requirement that applicants for academic positions be judged solely on their scientific knowledge; Wicksell had rendered himself unsuitable by his propagation of questionable social theories. To the accompaniment of a stormy debate in the press, protests by many groups in the universities that academic freedom was being violated, and demonstrations by the students in Lund and Uppsala, the matter was passed on to the university chancellor. The chancellor expressed some hesitation about recommending Wicksell, who had no "feeling for the realities of life" and was inclined to opinions "repellent to patriotism and morality." He proposed, nevertheless, that in view of his fully confirmed scientific ability, Wicksell be appointed professor in accordance with the university regulations. The appointment was confirmed by royal decree on November 1, 1901. It was greeted by radical opinion as "a victory for justice and law over the clerical threat to freedom of research." But even among professed conservatives in the universities and in the rightist press there had been support for Wicksell's appointment in accordance with the established university regulation. Professorship at Lund. Wicksell's appointment to a professorship at the age of 50 did not produce a new burst of scientific creativity. His later scientific work mainly took the form of articles in economic journals, notably the Swedish Ekonomisk tidskrift. It was this periodical that in the early years of the century published his important contributions to the theory of distribution and, later, at the time of World War i, several articles on monetary theory. His teaching took much time from research; instead of lecturing and giving seminars on pure theory, an easy task for him, he did most of his teaching in applied economics, out of consideration for the interests and needs of the law students. There were also other things that distracted
WICKSELL, KNUT Wicksell from large-scale research during the early years of the century. In 1903 he was promoted from an associate to a full professorship—not without renewed protests in the University Council against his "pernicious, unpatriotic activities as an enlightener of the people"—and he now felt more free to resume his work as a popular lecturer. In 1904, in a speech at a May Day demonstration, he again challenged public opinion (as he had done in 1892) by suggesting Scandinavian disarmament and by inviting Russia to annex Sweden and consequently be reformed by the Scandinavian welfare states. A few years later he acquired nationwide notoriety by defending a freethinking agitator who was in jail for blasphemy. He himself was prosecuted for casting ridicule on the story of the Immaculate Conception; in December 1908 he was sentenced to two months' imprisonment. After an unsuccessful appeal, he spent the two months in a city jail, where he peacefully revised his published lectures, completed a pamphlet on population theory, and worked on a translation of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. In the following years Wicksell was on several occasions in danger of prosecution for satirical lectures on religious questions or for defending acts of violence on the part of the left-wing labor movement. His wife and closest friends tried to steer him away from such activities, which not only endangered the financial position of the family but also made concentration on scientific matters difficult for him. In his thinking about economic problems, he tended to become preoccupied with aspects of social injustice; to escape from these preoccupations, he often fled into the field of mathematical theory, which in the family circle was referred to as "TT." "I do nothing but brood on lectures I feel I ought to give," he wrote to his wife early in 1914, "and then, when I do not dare, I lose interest in my work and begin to brood on TT instead; at least that is something neutral." The dilemma was not solved until the outbreak of World War i, which provided him with an important new interest in the economics of war and, particularly, in the monetary problems involved. Falling back on his earlier study of monetary matters, Wicksell now became a critic of—and to some extent an adviser to—the Swedish Central Bank. During the early years of the war he thought that inflation could be avoided by a restrictive policy of credit and public expenditure. Moreover, he felt that to counteract the inflationary effects of the gold influx, resulting from an increasingly favorable trade balance, this policy should be combined with a suspension of the gold standard. These
543
recommendations were followed to a certain extent. Wicksell later added a policy of export duties and import premiums; he even thought that these measures could be expanded into a system regulating the whole of foreign trade. These new activities kept Wicksell busy during the war years; he even had the opportunity for some foreign travel, facilitated by grants from the Central Bank. It was during a trip to England in 1916 that he briefly met J. M. Keynes, whom he recognized as the "keenest theorist in Britain." However, the esteem was not reciprocal. Last years. In 1917, when Wicksell retired from his chair in Lund, the family moved back to Stockholm, into the small suburban villa that their more affluent friends had acquired for them. Here Wicksell spent his declining years as the eminent authority in economic science, which was being taken over by a new generation—Eli Heckscher, Erik Lindahl, Bertil Ohlin, and Gunnar Myrdal. He became the first president of the Economists' Club, which was founded in 1917, and he hardly missed a meeting during the following years. He retained his intellectual clarity in old age and actually wrote some of his most penetrating analytical articles during his last years. Among Wicksell's side interests, the population question remained the leading one. His other political interests had abated—in the social and constitutional fields most of the reforms he had fought for had actually been adopted—and he had given up his popular lecturing. However, he never gave up his radicalism, and as late as 1923 he contributed an antireligious article to the anarchist paper Brand ("Fire"). Wicksell died on May 3, 1926, at the age of 74. In the elaborate funeral procession, like those usually reserved for statesmen, red banners predominated, and following the eulogies of friends and colleagues, there were speeches on behalf of the Social Democratic party of Sweden, the Young Socialist Association of Sweden, labor unions in Lund, and the Central Trade Union Organization of Stockholm. Various associations and academic institutions sent the customary wreaths, but many of his friends and disciples, honoring his request, sent contributions instead to the Malthusian Center for Birth Control. TORSTEN GARDLUND [See also INTEREST; and the biographies of BOHMBAWERK; MALTHUS; RICARDO; THORNTON; WALRAS.] WORKS BY WICKSELL 1892
Kapitalzins und Arbeitslohn. Jahrbucher fur Nationalokonomie und Statistik 59:852-874.
544
WICKSTEED, PHILIP HENRY
(1893) 1954 Value, Capital and Rent. New York: Rinehart. -> First published as Uber Wert, Kapital und Rente nach den neueren nationalokonomischen Theorien. 1895 Zur Lehre von der Steuerincidenz. Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of Uppsala. 1896 Finanztheoretische Untersuchungen nebst Darstellung und Kritik des Steuerwesens Schwedens. Jena (Germany): Fischer. (1898) 1936 Interest and Prices (Geldzins und Giiterpreise). With an introduction by Bertil Ohlin. London: Macmillan. -» First published in German. A study of the factors regulating the value of money. (1901-1906) 1935-1951 Lectures on Political Economy. 2 vols. London: Routledge; New York: Macmillan. -> First published in Swedish. Volume 1: General Theory. Volume 2: Money. Selected Papers on Economic Theory. Edited with an introduction by Erik Lindahl. London: Allen & Unwin, 1958. -> Contains papers first published between 1897 and 1958. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
GARDLUND, TORSTEN (1956) 1958 The Life of Knut Wicksell. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. -> First published in Swedish. OHLIN, BERTIL 1926 Knut Wicksell: 1851-1926. Economic Journal 36:503-511. OHLIN, BERTIL 1937 Some Notes on the Stockholm Theory of Savings and Investment. Part 1. Economic Journal 47:51-69. SANGER, C. P. 1898 [A Book Review of] Geldzins und Giiterpreise, by Knut Wicksell. Economic Journal 8: 384-386. SHACKLE, G. L. S. 1959 [A Book Review of] The Life of Knut Wicksell, by Torsten Gardlund. Bankers' Magazine (London) 187:259-261. SOMMARIN, EMIL 1930 Das Lebenswerk von Knut Wicksell. Zeitschrift fur Nationalokonomie 2:221-267. UHR, CARL G. 1960 Economic Doctrines of Knut Wicksell. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press.
WICKSTEED, PHILIP HENRY Philip Henry Wicksteed (1844-1927) was an English economist of the subjective value school. He is noted for his statements of marginal utility theory, opportunity cost, the reversibility of the supply curve, and distribution theory. He is less remembered for an ambitious attempt to make economics a part of a general theory of choice. From Jevons, Wicksteed got the idea that the more of a good we have the less is the value of an additional unit of it. Jevons called that value the final degree of utility. Wicksteed, renaming it marginal utility, reasoned that we buy goods in such quantities that a dollar spent on each of them adds the same amount to our total utility or satisfaction. Their marginal utilities then will be proportional to their prices. He first wrote of this in The Alphabet
of Economic Science (1888) and used differential calculus to explain it, which was then an unusual thing to do. Wicksteed applied marginal utility to the pricing of labor and capital. Jevons had not been explicit about the relation between the value of a good and the prices paid to the resources that produce it. Wicksteed, like, the Austrian subjective value theorists, said the value of the good determines the value of the resources. He went further and said the price of a resource equals the value that a marginal unit adds to the output it produces. This is the theory of marginal productivity; it was developed concurrently by other economists in the 1890s. Wicksteed's originality lay in his integration of the theory of the value of goods and the theory of the value of resources. He did so in An Essay on the Co-ordination of the Laws of Distribution (1894), asserting that if in the production of any given amount of a good each resource is paid the value of its marginal product, the total of the payments will be equal to the market value of that amount of the good. He later withdrew the theorem in the belief it was mistaken, but actually the mistake was small. The theorem is valid when output varies in the same proportion as the input of resources and when a change in output does not change the price of the product, that is, when the production function is linear and homogeneous and the market is perfectly competitive. Wicksteed made extensive use of the idea of opportunity cost, which is that the cost of anything is the (marginal) value of what must be given up to get it. He is remembered too for his conception of the supply curve, namely, that the supply price of any given amount of a good is its marginal utility to the sellers. A less familiar but not neglected idea is what Wicksteed called "the economic nexus." It was his explanation of the mutual advantage of specialization and exchange, something Adam Smith referred to in his famous and unfortunate phrase as "the invisible hand." Wicksteed explained that the dealings people have with each other are designed to advance their separate interests. The interests may be altruistic as well as selfish, but the altruism is never directed to the other persons in v the relationship. A butcher may be philanthropic but not toward the housewife before him: he is intent on maximizing his returns, and so is she; but this makes their behavior no less worthy. All of behavior, and not just that in the market place, was in Wicksteed's view governed by the marginal principle. In everything we do we try to get the greatest possible return—we try to maximize. We do that when we carry each of our actions
WIENER, NORBERT to a point at which its marginal return equals that from each of our other actions. Just as we buy bread and wine in such quantities that a dollar spent on one adds as much to our utility as a dollar spent on another, so we listen to music and look at pictures until an hour spent in one way is as rewarding as an hour spent in another. So, too, it is with the care of our children, attention to friends, the discharge of our spiritual obligations, and everything else. Wicksteed's theory was more useful when applied to economic choices than to others. But it was meant to do more. To think of him as a great expositor of marginalism in economics is to underestimate his intentions. While economic choices were his main interest, Wicksteed continually related them to others and said that all were determined by the principle of maximization. He did this in his major work, The Common Sense of Political Economy (1910). Its epigraph is from the early sociology of Comte to the effect that economics should be studied in relation to other behavior. Wicksteed was influenced by Comte as well as by Jevons. Another influence was Ruskin who, insisting that wealth was that which was life-giving, tried to get economists to take a broad view of their subject. Wicksteed was in the tradition of nonconformism, being himself a Unitarian clergyman for part of his life. He brought to economics the humanitarian feelings, the critical eye, and the common sense of his tradition. He came to economics in middle age (as Ricardo did) at a time when he was under the influence of the Fabians. To the end of his life he was sympathetic to the purposes of socialism. The Fabians deferred to his economic expertise, and he has the distinction of having bested George Bernard Shaw in a polemic. Wicksteed also brought to economics a mind interested in literature, philosophy, and theology. He was a scholar of Dante, Wordsworth, and Ibsen and wrote about them. He translated (with F. M. Cornford) the Physics of Aristotle and wrote extensively on theology, including a work on Aquinas. He seems to have approached these other fields in a didactic way, drawing from them, especially from literature, guides to behavior. His major work on economics can also be taken as such a guide. Time, however, has not taken it that way. What are best remembered are his propositions about economic behavior. Nevertheless, the work of the economist has a place in the order of understanding, Wicksteed once said. The place is lower than that of the prophets and poets, but it is in the same universe: "If he can give no strength he may save
545
strength from being wasted. . . . If he can give sight to some blind reforming Samson he too has served" (1910, p. 124). WILLIAM D. GRAMPP [For the historical context of Wicksteed's work, see ECONOMIC THOUGHT, article on THE AUSTRIAN SCHOOL; and the biographies of JEVONS; MENGER; WALRAS.] WORKS BY WICKSTEED (1888) 1955 The Alphabet of Economic Science: Elements of the Theory of Value or Worth. London: Macmillan; New York: Kelley. (1894) 1932 An Essay on the Co-ordination of the Laws of Distribution. Series of Reprints of Scarce Tracts in Economic and Political Science, No. 12. London School of Economics and Political Science. (1910) 1950 The Common Sense of Political Economy, and Selected Papers and Reviews on Economic Theory. Rev. & enl. ed. Edited by Lionel Robbins. 2 vols. London: Routledge; New York: Kelley. SUPPLEMENTARY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
HERFORD, C. H. 1931 Philip Henry Wicksteed: His Life and Work. London: Dent. -» Includes an extensive bibliography of Wicksteed's writings. STIGLER, GEORGE J. 1941 Production and Distribution Theories. New York: Macmillan. -> See especially pages 38-60 and 323-335.
WIENER, NORBERT Norbert Wiener was born in Columbia, Missouri, in 1894 and died while visiting Stockholm, Sweden, in 1964. A child prodigy, he became a widely respected mathematician and teacher. During the last twenty years of his life, he became known throughout the world as a founder of and spokesman for the new science that he had named "cybernetics." Cybernetics, in a narrow sense, is the study of the relationship between information processing and purposeful behavior, both in machines and in animals. In a wider sense the concepts of cybernetics apply to social systems as well and suggest new ways to analyze complex social organizations in terms of the flow and processing of information. However, the more fundamental promise of cybernetics lies not in its ability to help explain the behavior of complex systems, but rather in the fact that the explanations are framed in the new language of information and control. Because of this, the real revolution stimulated by Wiener's notions on cybernetics is a conceptual one that reaches deep into the foundation and structure of the sciences. Wiener's education and intellectual outlook were enormously influenced by his father, Leo Wiener,
546
WIENER, NORBERT
who himself had been an intellectually precocious child. Leo Wiener, who was born in Russia and educated in Europe, arrived in the United States at the age of 21 and later became a teacher. Eventually he became professor of Slavic languages and literature at Harvard, where he taught for thirty years before his retirement. Leo Wierner, like James Mill, the father of an earlier child prodigy, had his own theories about educating children. Under his father's rigorous tutelage and discipline, Norbert Wiener at the age of seven was reading books on biology and physics that were beyond even his father's scope. He entered high school at the age of nine and graduated three years later. He then entered Tufts College and graduated—cum laude in mathematics—at 15. After a false start toward advanced work in biology, Wiener studied philosophy; he received his PH.D. from Harvard in 1913, at the age of 18. Upon leaving Harvard, Wiener secured a postdoctoral fellowship that allowed him to travel to Cambridge University, where he studied epistemology and logic with Bertrand Russell and mathematics with G. H. Hardy. After his stay at Cambridge, he went to Gottingen, where he studied mathematics with Landau and David Hilbert and philosophy with Husserl. During a brief period following his return to America he was a writer for the Encyclopedia Americana, a mathematician computing ballistic tables for the U.S. Army at the Aberdeen proving grounds, and also a journalist for the Boston Herald. Then, in the spring of 1919, Wiener accepted a position in the mathematics department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he remained, eventually to become a full professor and later Institute professor. His first work at M.I.T. was on the theory of Brownian motion. This work, which was influenced by the notions of J. Willard Gibbs on statistical mechanics and Lebesgue on probability, shaped his subsequent statistical treatment of the problems of information and communication. Wiener's early mathematical work on harmonic analysis had a later impact on his notions about the filtering and predicting of time series. Thus, much of the mathematical work that he developed during the first part of his career later influenced his ideas on cybernetics. About 1940, when the United States was gearing itself for a possible war, Wiener became involved in the problem of designing fire control equipment. It was around this complex set of problems that his ideas on information processing and control coalesced to form the basis of cybernetics. The problem of fire control is to design a machine that, when
fed radar tracking data, will compute how to aim a gun so that its projectile will intersect the path of the moving target at the appropriate time. This involves not only a theory of prediction and a mechanism to embody the theory but also a theory of stability and control. In the course of this work, Wiener and his colleague Julian Bigelow (who was later to direct the construction of the first von Neumann-type electronic computer at Princeton University) recognized the critical role of feedback in the organization of a control system. This recognition led to the conjecture that the kinds of information processing and feedback loops necessary to control a mechanical system might resemble those in the cerebellum that control purposeful human behavior. If this conjecture was true, then similar kinds of breakdowns in the internal information-processing mechanisms of a man and of a mechanical control system would produce similar pathological behavior. These ideas were recorded in a paper jointly authored by Wiener, Bigelow, and A. Rosenblueth called "Behavior, Purpose and Teleology," which was published in 1943. It makes explicit the thesis that the brain can be viewed, in a mechanical way, as a kind of computing machine, and that the concepts of information and control are adequate to explain purposeful motor behavior. Left implicit, however, is the further conjecture that the concepts of information and control will be adequate to explain the mechanisms and processes underlying the behavioral correlates of so-called "higher mental functions" involved in thinking. Wiener was not able to publish a fuller treatment of these ideas until the end of World War n. In 1948 Wiener published his book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, which became a best seller and was reprinted many times and translated into many languages. In that now-famous book, Wiener attempted to bring together the concepts underlying information processing, communication, and control. He described the relationship of these cybernetic concepts to other disciplines ranging from neurophysiology, mathematical logic, and computer science to psychology and sociology. His book had an impact on many scientists in these fields, stimulating them to take a fresh look at their own work from a cybernetic point of view. It suggested to psychologists that the behavioral correlates of thinking, remembering, learning, and so forth could be analyzed in terms of the underlying information processes. And much work on the computer simulation of behavior has emerged from that suggestion. The notion of viewing the brain as a
WIESE, LEOPOLD VON kind of computing machine stimulated neurophysiologists not merely to make comparisons between components and coding in both systems but also to try to interpret the logical organization of the brain in terms of information processing and control mechanisms. The diversity of cybernetic applications in different fields sheds light on the unifying aspect of its basic concepts. Traditionally, a chasm has separated work on the psychology of complex behavior from work on those physiological mechanisms that produce behavior. The gap between these two fields is, in fact, a communication gap caused by the semantic mismatch of concepts from the languages of physiology and psychology. The concepts of behavioristic psychology are too gross and elaborate to fit with the more atomistic concepts from the language of physiology. This same kind of gap would make it impossible to explain the behavior of a digital control computer in terms of the basic physics of its switches, wires, and so forth. Because cybernetics deals with a set of concepts intermediate between psychology and physiology it can provide a conceptual bridge to span both disciplines. The deeper meaning of cybernetics, which lies in the structure of its language and its role in analyzing complex systems in terms of information processing, communication, and control, has yet to be fully unfolded by philosophers of science. The extent to which Wiener himself saw this philosophical dimension of his work is not clear. However, he did see clearly some of the socialscientific implications of cybernetics. He believed, and others have subsequently developed the notion, that the economy can be viewed as a control system aimed at maintaining certain conditions of economic growth and that economic instability in the form of period booms and slumps is similar to oscillations in a poorly designed mechanical control system. In a similar vein Wiener argued that society can be examined and understood in terms of the flow and processing of information between individuals and social groups. Wiener was particularly fearful of the expanding role of the computing machine. He recognized very early that machines could and would eventually displace an increasing number of workers both in the factory and in the office, and he thought that if economic incentives pushed automation ahead of our understanding of its consequences, technological unemployment could shatter social and economic stability. He was also concerned about the potential misuse of computers in decision making and feared that as machines became increasingly complex their users would be less aware of the con-
547
sequences of their instructions to the machines. As a result, a decision maker might cause a machine to initiate some action the consequences of which might, in fact, be contrary to his actual desires. During the last ten years of his life Wiener traveled widely, lecturing and writing about cybernetics and the potential dangers to a society vastly influenced by computers and automation. Earlier in his life Wiener had received recognition for his contributions to mathematics, and shortly before his death he was awarded the National Medal of Science by the president of the United States. M. E. MARON [See also CONCEPT FORMATION; CYBERNETICS; INFORMATION THEORY; SIMULATION; SYSTEMS ANALYSIS; and the biographies of BABBAGE; VON NEUMANN.] WORKS BY WIENER 1943
ROSENBLUETH, A.; WlENER, NORBERT;
and
BlGE-
LOW, J. Behavior, Purpose and Teleology. Philosophy of Science 10, no. 1:18-24. (1948) 1961 Cybernetics: Or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. 2d ed. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press. (1950) 1954 The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. 2d ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 1953 Ex-prodigy: My Childhood and Youth. New York: Simon & Schuster. 1956 I Am a Mathematician; The Later Life of a Prodigy: An Autobiographical Account of the Mature Years and Career of Norbert Wiener and a Continuation of the Account of His Childhood in Ex-prodigy. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. -» A paperback edition was published in 1964 by M.I.T. Press. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
Norbert Wiener, 1894-1964. 1966 American Mathematical Society, Bulletin 72, no. 1, part 2. -» A bibliography appears on pages 135-145.
WIESE, LEOPOLD VON Leopold Max Walter von Wiese und Kaiserswaldau, German sociologist, was born in 1876 in Glatz (Silesia), the son of a Prussian officer. He was first educated in a military academy but changed his plans about becoming an officer during his last year in school. He graduated from the Gymnasium of Gorlitz in 1898 and then enrolled in the law faculty of the University of Berlin in order to study the social sciences, especially social policy. In 1900 he was invited by Wilhelm Merton to work at the Institut fiir Gemeinwohl in Frankfurt, where he began to study modern social problems. He received his PH.D. in 1902 and became Privatdozent at the University of Berlin in 1905. He also taught at the academies of Posen and Diisseldorf. He spent some
548
WIESE, LEOPOLD VON
time traveling, especially in Asia, before becoming affiliated with the School of Commerce and Business Administration in Cologne (the school became a university shortly afterward, in 1919). Von Wiese has maintained his connection with this school ever since. He also taught in the United States, at Harvard University in 1934/1935 and at the University of Wisconsin in 1935. After his return to Germany, he held himself aloof from the official ideology of National Socialism and consequently experienced some difficulty in teaching and publishing. Although his chair at Cologne had been established for economics and social policy, von Wiese concentrated more and more on sociology and became one of the outstanding German sociologists after World War I. He was the chief editor of the Kolner Vierteljahrshefte fur Sozialwissenschaften, which in 1921 became the well-known Kolner Vierteljahrshefte fur Soziologie; its publication was ended in 1934 after the National Socialists came to power. He was a president of the German Sociological Association, which had been founded by Max Weber and others in 1909 and which was also dissolved in 1934. When German sociology revived after World War n, it was von Wiese who, despite his advancing age, reintroduced the systematic teaching of sociology into the universities of Cologne, Bonn, and Mainz. He fought for the immediate needs of scientific research and academic organization and re-established the German Sociological Association, which held its first postwar convention in September 1946. Early in 1947 the third edition of a prewar book (1926) of von Wiese's was reissued and became the first postwar introductory textbook on sociology in Germany. The new series of the Kolner Zeitschrift fur Soziologie (from 1955, Kolner Zeitschrift fur Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie} began to appear under his editorship in May 1948. One can best locate von Wiese in contemporary social theory by linking him with Talcott Parsons' famous statement, "Spencer is dead." Indeed, von Wiese started his academic career with a general critical review of Spencer's system (1906). Like Parsons, he emphasized that it was Spencer's social theory as a total structure that was dead, whereas some of the details might last. His critical stance toward Spencer's system led von Wiese generally to reject historical and encyclopedic sociology. Instead, he believed the main task of sociology to be the systematic observation of the "social process." He had therefore to develop both a systematic theoretical approach to the social process and a system of categories that would help him to analyze the social process empirically. Likewise, he had to
overcome the tendency toward the excessive reification of social life that was so common in older sociological systems. Explaining his approach, von Wiese wrote: Theoretical sociology, therefore, has but one object proper to itself, one proper subject matter: the "social." There are only integrated occurrences which therefore have a mere verbal character, namely, influences of men upon men which take place within the human sphere of time and space, and which we might call "social" or "interhuman." . . . Let us suppose that this constantly flowing stream of interhuman activity is halted in its course for one moment. We will then see that it is an apparently impenetrable network of lines between men. . . . The connections . . . are called . . . social [relationships] and the entire network is called the social system of relations. ([1931-1937] 1941, pp. 29-30)
Von Wiese's "geometry of social relations" is similar to that of Georg Simmel. One may locate human beings in this complicated network of "mutual occurrences" by studying the processes of approach and withdrawal among them. These changes of distance between men, the basic process in the social dimension, can be systematically observed. Social structures arise when these social relations crystallize in such a way "that they are understood as units or substances in daily life." Thus, the analysis of social structures means "reducing them to social processes." Whereas von Wiese was at first concerned mainly with systematic sociology as the analysis of "interhuman phenomena," after 1940 he concentrated more and more on philosophical anthropology, in order to arrive at a deeper understanding of the human element in the social process. From about 1947 on, he began to concentrate on ethics for the same reason. Throughout his life he has been active in liberal causes, and his contributions to sociology have reinforced his efforts on behalf of liberalism. RENE KONIG [Other relevant material may be found in INTERACTION, articles on SOCIAL INTERACTION and SYMBOLIC INTERACTION; and in the biographies of SIMMEL and SPENCER.] 1906
Zur
WORKS BY VON WIESE Grundlegung der Gesellschaftslehre.
Jena:
Fischer, 1910 1915
Einfuhrung in die Sozialpolitik. Leipzig: Gloeckner. Gedanken uber Menschlichkeit. Munich: Duncker & Humblot. 1917a Der Liberalismus in Vergangenheit und Zukunft. Berlin: Fischer. 1917i» Strindberg: Ein Beitrag zur Soziologie der Geschlechter. Munich: Duncker & Humblot. (1924-1929) 1932 Systematic Sociology: On the Basis of the Beziehungslehre and the Gebildelehre of Leopold
WIESER, FRIEDRICH VON von Wiese. Adapted and amplified by Howard Becker. New York: Wiley. -» First published as System der allgemeinen Soziologie. (1926) 1967 Soziologie: Geschichte und Hauptprobleme. 8th ed. Berlin: Gruyter. (1931-1937) 1941 Sociology. Edited by Franz Mueller. New York: Piest. -> Contains an article first published in the Handworterbuch der Soziologie in 1931, an article first published in Volume 3 of the Worterbuch der Volkswirtschaft in 1932, and a lecture delivered in London in 1937. 1940 Homo sum: Gedanken zu einer zusammenfassenden Anthropologie. Jena: Fischer. (1947) 1960 Ethik in der Schauweise der Wissenschaften vom Menschen und von der Gesellschaft. 2d ed. Bern: Francke. 1950 Gesellschaftliche Stdnde und Klassen. Bern: Francke. 1959 Philosophic und Soziologie. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. SUPPLEMENTARY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ABEL, THEODORE 1929 Systematic Sociology in Germany: A Critical Analysis of Some Attempts to Establish Sociology as an Independent Science. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. KONIG, RENE 1958 Germany. Pages 779-806 in Joseph S. Roucek (editor), Contemporary Sociology. New York: Philosophical Library. STAUFFER, ERNEST 1950 La methode relationelle en psychologie sociale et en sociologie selon L. von Wiese. Paris: Delachaux & Niestle.
WIESER, FRIEDRICH VON Friedrich Freiherr von Wieser (1851-1926) was an Austrian economist and sociologist who—with his fellow student and brother-in-law Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk—developed the ideas of Carl Menger and made the Austrian school of marginal utility analysis widely known. Born in Vienna as the son of a government official of the highest rank (on whom a barony had been conferred, hence the "Freiherr von"), he studied law at the University of Vienna. Wieser's early interest in history, stimulated by T. B. Macaulay, Herbert Spencer, and Leo Tolstoi, directed his attention to the problem of general laws of social evolution. However, the publication of Menger's Grundsdtze in 1871, just as Wieser and Bohm-Bawerk were completing their studies at the university, led Wieser to shift the focus of his interests. He thought that this change represented only a new point of departure for his work in sociology. Instead, it led him to occupy himself for forty years with economic theory, although he never entirely lost sight of his aim of giving a more comprehensive treatment to social theory. After leaving the university, Wieser entered government service, in which he remained for about ten years, interrupted by two years of further study
549
at the German universities of Heidelberg, Jena, and Leipzig under K. Knies, W. Roscher, and B. Hildebrand, respectively. In Knies's seminar, Wieser produced in 1876 the first statement of what eight years later was to be the main point of his first book, an application of marginal utility analysis to the phenomenon of cost, which he interpreted as foregone utility in alternative uses. In addition to the theory of cost, this first book, Uber den Ursprung und die Hauptgesetze des wirtschaftlichen Werthes (1884), contained an elaborate theory of the determination of the value of the factors of production by the "imputation" (Zurechnung) to them of an appropriate part of the utility of the final products; it also introduced the term Grenznutzen (marginal utility). The book gained him first a lectureship at the University of Vienna and soon after a professorship at the Charles University of Prague. Here he continued to work on the same problems and also on what he regarded merely as a first step toward a theory of value that was to be fully developed in Natural Value (1889). In the latter work he employed the expository device of studying value in a centrally directed economy and suggested possible applications of utility theory to public finance. The book gained him almost immediate acclaim, and it was soon translated into English. During Wieser's remaining 14 years at the University of Prague, he devoted himself chiefly to problems of currency, taxation, and social and economic policy, as well as to the political and cultural problems of Bohemia, particularly its Germanspeaking minority. He made his first excursion into sociology in an address, "Uber die gesellschaftlichen Gewalten" (1901), which he delivered when he assumed the rectorship of the university. In 1903, when Menger resigned from his chair at the University of Vienna, Wieser was appointed to replace him. Here he combined work on the value of money (and an incidental but important study on the theory of urban rents) with an increasing concern with political and sociological issues. However, in 1912 an invitation from Max Weber to contribute the basic treatise on economic theory to the great survey of social economics that Weber was to edit recalled him once more to economic theory. The result, Social Economics (1914), appeared shortly before the outbreak of World War i. It is the only systematic treatise on general economic theory produced by the older Austrian school. At the same time, it is, like all works of Wieser's, a highly personal and distinctive statement. In the pure theory of value this statement became the starting point of a Wieserian branch of the Aus-
550
WILKS, S. S.
trian school (represented by such scholars as Hans Mayer and Leo Schonfeld); it also contains important contributions to what later became the theory of imperfect competition. Toward the end of the war, Wieser served first in the upper house of the Austrian parliament and later as minister of commerce in the last two Imperial Austrian governments, a position in which he was concerned mainly with the planning of a postwar customs union with Germany. After the collapse of Austria—Hungary he returned to his professorship and devoted himself to an account of the collapse, an event that had moved him greatly. It gave him the final impulse to the resumption of his sociological work; in his last years he produced his great treatise, Das Gesetz der Macht (1926), which appeared shortly before his death. Its main theme is an elaboration of David Hume's thesis that all power rests on opinion; Wieser built on this thesis a "law of small numbers," describing the role that elites of various sorts play in all power structures. It is even more true of this sociological work than it is of his work in economics that its highly personal character gave it a unity that had great aesthetic appeal for his pupils and admirers but made it somewhat difficult for other readers to appreciate. Since in his hands even the familiar took a different shape, it is not easy to identify his truly original contributions, with the result that in the long run his influence seems to be smaller and is certainly more difficult to identify than that of many men of lesser achievement. FRIEDRICH A. VON HAYEK [For the historical context of Wieser's work, see ECONOMIC THOUGHT, article on THE AUSTRIAN SCHOOL; and the biographies of BOHM-BAWERK; HUME; MENGER; for discussion of the subsequent development of his ideas, see UTILITY.] WORKS BY WIESER
1884
Uber den Ursprung und die Hauptgesetze des wirtschaftlichen Werthes. Vienna: Holder. (1889) 1956 Natural Value. Edited with a preface and analysis by William Smart. New York: Kelley & Millman. -> First published as Der natiirliche Werth. (1901) 1929 Uber die gesellschaftlichen Gewalten. Pages 346-376 in Friedrich von Wieser, Gesammelte Abhandlungen. Tubingen: Mohr. (1914) 1927 Social Economics. New York: Greenberg. -> First published as "Theorie der gesellschaftlichen Wirtschaft," Volume 1, Part 2 of Grundriss der Sozialokonomik. 1926 Das Gesetz der Macht. Vienna: Springer. Gesammelte Abhandlungen. Edited with an introduction by Friedrich A. von Hayek. Tubingen: Mohr, 1929. -> Contains writings published between 1876 and 1923.
SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
BLAUG, MARK 1962 Economic Theory in Retrospect. Homewood, 111.: Irwin. HOWEY, RICHARD S. 1960 The Rise of the Marginal Utility School: 1870-1889. Lawrence: Univ. of Kansas Press. -> See especially pages 143-154, "Friedrich von Wieser." HUTCHISON, T. W. (1953) 1962 A Review of Economic Doctrines: 1870-1921. Oxford: Clarendon. -» See especially pages 153-164, "F. von Wieser (1851-1926)." MAYER, HANS 1927 Friedrich Wieser zum Gedachtnis. Zeitschrift fur Volkswirtschaft und Sozialpolitik New Series 5: 633-645. MAYER, HANS 1929 Friedrich Freiherr von Wieser. Volume 6, pages 180-198 in Neue osterreichische Biographie: 1815-1918. Vienna: Amalthea. MENZEL, ADOLF 1927 Friedrich Wieser als Soziologe. Vienna: Springer. SCHAMS, EWALD 1926 Friedrich Freiherr von Wieser und sein Werk. Zeitschrift fur die gesamte Staatswissenschaft 81:432-448. STIGLER, GEORGE J. 1941 Production and Distribution Theories: The Formative Period. New York: Macmillan. -> See especially Chapter 4. VLEUGELS, WILHELM 1930 Die Losungen des wirtschaftlichen Zurechnungsproblems bei Bohm-Bawerk und Wieser. Konigsberger Gelehrte Gesellschaft, Geisteswissenschaftliche Klasse, Schriften, Vol. 7, part 5. Halle: Neimeyer.
WILKS, S. S. The various professional roles of the statistician Samuel Stanley Wilks (1906-1964) so parallel the development of mathematics in the mid-twentieth century that he seems ready-made for the hero in a sociological novel entitled "The Professional Mathematician." Like most important mathematicians, Wilks early made strong research contributions, and his innovations opened new lines of research for others. But not very many mathematicians succeeded, as he did, in attracting fine students who, in their turn, used their training to specialize in such diverse areas as statistics, mathematical statistics, probability, sociology, governmental service, and defense research. Still fewer mathematicians have advanced their fields by major editorial commitments as Wilks did, both through the Annals of Mathematical Statistics and through the Wiley Publications in Statistics. What is rare among mathematicians is the belief, which Wilks held, in the value of organization, distinct from individual achievement, for the future of mathematics. Acting on this belief, he deliberately devoted much of his career to scientific societies, to committees of governmental agencies, and to public and private foundations; his contributions ranged far beyond the limits of even the broadest
WILKS, S. S. interpretations of mathematics. The combination of these activities produced a dedicated scholar, a major educator, and a public servant. Wilks was born to Chance C. and Bertha May Gammon Wilks in Little Elm, Texas. He and his two younger brothers were raised on a small (for Texas), 250-acre farm near Little Elm. During his formal education, he had a notable set of teachers. W. M. Whyburn, later chairman of the department of mathematics at the University of North Carolina, taught Wilks in the seventh grade. In high school, Wilks used to sneak off to take a college mathematics course during study hour. In 1926 he took a bachelor's degree in architecture at North Texas State Teachers College. While earning his M.A. in mathematics at the University of Texas (he received it in 1928), he studied topology with R. L. Moore and statistics with E. L. Dodd, who encouraged him to join Henry L. Rietz at the University of Iowa, then the leading center in the United States for the study of mathematical statistics. At Iowa, E. F. Lindquist introduced him to a problem which led to Wilks's thesis, entitled "On the Distributions of Statistics in Samples From a Normal Population of Two Variables With Matched Sampling of One Variable" (1932a). This began Wilks's long series of contributions to multivariate analysis, his interest in the applications of statistical methods, and his lifelong relation with the fields of education, testing, and the social sciences. He received a PH.D. in mathematical statistics in 1931. After the National Research Council awarded him a National Research Fellowship, Wilks and his bride, Gena Orr of Denton, Texas, went to Columbia University so that he could work with Harold Hotelling. There Wilks also listened to C. E. Spearman and met Walter Shewhart of Bell Telephone Laboratories, who then and later introduced him to many research problems arising from industrial applications of statistics. The next year his fellowship was renewed, and Wilks went to work in Karl Pearson's department of applied statistics at University College, London. Wilks's only child, Stanley Neal, was born there in October 1932. In London Wilks met and worked with Egon Pearson, who remained a lifelong friend, and, of course, he met R. A. Fisher and Jerzy Neyman. At midyear he moved to Cambridge, where he worked with John Wishart and got to know M. S. Bartlett and W. G. Cochran. By the end of his two-year fellowship he had published six papers, two of which grew out of his doctoral
551
thesis; another was entitled "Moments and Distributions of Estimates of Population Parameters From Fragmentary Samples" (1932fo). In this important paper Wilks dealt with the problem of missing values in multivariate data —in some kinds of investigations two or more characteristics are to be measured for each member of the sample, but occasionally the value of one variable or another may be missing, as when only part of a skeleton is found in an archeological study. Wilks found for bivariate normal distributions the maximum likelihood equations for estimating the parameters and suggested some alternative estimators. He also suggested the determinant of the inverse of the asymptotic covariance matrix of a set of estimators as the appropriate measure of information that estimators jointly contain. At this period, mathematical statisticians were developing exact and approximate distributions of statistics of more and more complex quantities under idealized assumptions, making it possible to assess evidence offered by bodies of data about more and more complicated questions. Wilks's paper "Certain Generalizations in the Analysis of Variance" (1932c) was a major contribution to this development. Among the multivariate criteria proposed by Wilks, the one most used today is likely the one denoted by W in his 1932 Biometrika paper. In 1947 Bartlett used the notation A for this statistic as applied in a wider variety of contexts than originally proposed by Wilks, and in 1948 C. R. Rao introduced the frequently heard term "Wilks's A criterion." This criterion provided a multivariate generalization of what is now called the analysis of variance F test. If the "among" sum of squares in analysis of variance is generalized to a p x p matrix A of sums of squares and products and the "within" sum of squares is similarly generalized to a p x p matrix B, then the Wilks criterion is a ratio of determinants, namely, det(B)/det(A + B). In 1932 it was a considerable feat to determine, as Wilks did, the null distributions of this and many similar statistics. In this and other papers through the years, Wilks found the likelihood ratio criterion for testing many hypotheses in multivariate problems. The criteria repeatedly turn out to be powers of ratios of products of determinants of sample covariance matrices essentially like the formula above, and their moments are products of beta functions. He suggested the determinant of the covariance matrix as the generalized variance of a sample of points
552
WILKS, S. S.
in a multidimensional space, and he found the distribution of the multiple correlation coefficient. Wilks also found the likelihood ratio criterion and its moments for testing the null hypothesis that several multivariate populations have equal covariance matrices. Much later, in 1946, he found the likelihood ratio criteria for testing whether in one multivariate population the variances are equal and the covariances are equal, for testing whether all the means are equal if the variances are equal and the covariances are equal, and for testing all these hypotheses simultaneously. These problems arise from studying whether several forms of a test are nearly parallel. Elsewhere he showed that for a test consisting of many items, scorings based upon two different sets of weights for the items would produce pairs of total scores that were highly correlated across the individuals taking the test. The implication is that modest changes in the weights of the items on a long test make only small changes in the relative evaluations of individuals. He also suggested the likelihood test for independence in contingency tables, and he found the large-sample distribution of the likelihood ratio for testing composite hypotheses. Wilks encouraged his students to develop nonparametric or distribution-free methods and made major contributions to this area himself. In particular, he invented the statistical idea of tolerance limits, by analogy with the term as used in industry in connection with piece parts. Shewhart had asked for ways to make guarantees about mass-produced lots of parts. Wilks found that by using order statistics, for example, the largest and smallest measurements in a sample, one could make confidence statements about the fraction of the true population contained between the sample order statistics. To illustrate, for a sample of size 10 from a continuous population, the probability is 0.62 that at least 80 per cent of the population is contained between the smallest and largest sample values. Wilks and others have extended this idea in many directions. In 1933 Wilks joined the department of mathematics at Princeton University, which was his base of operations for the rest of his life. At Princeton he gradually developed both undergraduate and graduate courses in mathematical statistics, repeatedly writing up course notes, producing his long-awaited hard-cover Mathematical Statistics in 1962, and publishing several soft-cover books that had a substantial influence on the teaching of mathematical statistics. Wilks wrote or coauthored six books and about forty research papers. Wilks's first doctoral student, Joseph Daly, re-
ceived his degree in 1939, and thereafter Princeton had a small but strong graduate program in statistics. Wilks contributed to education in many ways. From the time of his arrival in Princeton, he participated in the work of the College Entrance Examination Board (and the Educational Testing Service), and some of his research problems arose from this source. He served on the Board's commission on mathematics and was a coauthor of their experimental text in probability and statistics for secondary school students. Later he became a member of the Advisory Board of the School Mathematics Study Group (SMSG) and a visiting lecturer for various groups. Wilks was one of a small group of statisticians who organized the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 1935 and later negotiated the arrangements transferring the Annals of Mathematical Statistics from the private ownership of its founder and first editor, Harry C. Carver, to the Institute. Thereupon Wilks took over the editorship of the Annals (serving from 1938 through 1949) and with it, in effect, the shaping of the long-run future of the Institute. To quote John Tukey, "A marginal journal with a small subscription list became an unqualified first-rank journal in its field; a once marginal society grew to adulthood in size and responsibility and contribution. There is no doubt that the wisdom and judgment of Wilks was crucial; some of us suspect it was irreplaceable" (1965, p. 150). Starting about 1941, Wilks began research for the National Defense Research Committee. During World War n, he became director of the Princeton Statistical Research Group, which had branches both in Princeton and in New York City. And he took an active part in the development and operation of the short courses that introduced statistical quality control to American industry. That such organizational developments persist is illustrated by the American Society for Quality Control, which was 20,000 strong in 1966. In 1947 Wilks was awarded the Presidential Certificate of Merit for his contributions to antisubmarine warfare and to the solution of convoy problems. After World War n, Wilks devoted his time more and more to national affairs and services to his profession, and less to research. He served the Social Science Research Council in many capacities, including successively the chairmanship of each of its three major subdivisions, over a period of 18 years. And from 1953 until his death he served the Russell Sage Foundation as a member of the Board of Directors and
WILLCOX, WALTER F. of the Executive Committee. He served the National Science Foundation both on its Divisional Committee for the Mathematical, Physical, and Engineering Sciences and on that for the Social Sciences. Over the years he worked on uncounted committees for the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, the American Statistical Association, and the federal government. He served in many capacities the Division of Mathematics of the National Research Council, chairing the division from 1958 to 1960. He helped organize the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences and served as its chairman in 1960. He was a member of the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO from 1960 to 1962 (see Anderson 1965app. 3-7). He was president of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 1940, and of the American Statistical Association in 1950. His other honors include election to the International Statistical Institute, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1947 the University of Iowa honored him with a Centennial Alumni Award. After his sudden death on March 7, 1964, several memorials were established, including an S. S. Wilks Memorial Fund at Princeton University and an American Statistical Association Samuel S. Wilks Memorial Award. FREDERICK MOSTELLER [For the historical context of Wilks's work, see the biographies of FISHER, R. A.; PEARSON; SPEARMAN; for discussion of the subsequent development of his ideas, see MULTIVARIATE ANALYSIS; NONPARAMETRIC STATISTICS, article on ORDER STATISTICS.] WORKS BY WILKS
1932a On the Distributions of Statistics in Samples From a Normal Population of Two Variables With Matched Sampling of One Variable. Metron 9, no. 3/4:87-126. 1932b Moments and Distributions of Estimates of Population Parameters From Fragmentary Samples. Annals of Mathematical Statistics 3:163-195. 1932c Certain Generalizations in the Analysis of Variance. Biometrika 24:471-494. 1932d On the Sampling Distribution of the Multiple Correlation Coefficient. Annals of Mathematical Statistics 3:196-203. 1935 The Likelihood Test of Independence in Contingency Tables. Annals of Mathematical Statistics 6:190-196. 1938a The Large-sample Distribution of the Likelihood Ratio for Testing Composite Hypotheses. Annals of Mathematical Statistics 9:60-62. 1938£> Weighting Systems for Linear Functions of Correlated Variables When There Is No Dependent Variable. Psychometrika 3:23-40. 1941 Determination of Sample Sizes for Setting Tolerance Limits. Annals of Mathematical Statistics 12: 91-96.
553
1946
Sample Criteria for Testing Equality of Means, Equality of Variances, and Equality of Covariances in a Normal Multivariate Distribution. Annals of Mathematical Statistics 17:257-281. (1957) 1959 COLLEGE ENTRANCE EXAMINATION BOARD, COMMISSION ON MATHEMATICS Introductory Probability and Statistical Inference: An Experimental Course, by E. C. Douglas, F. Mosteller . . . , and S. S. Wilks. Princeton, N.J.: The Board. 1962 Mathematical Statistics. New York: Wiley. 1965 Statistical Aspects of Experiments in Telepathy. Parts 1-2. New York Statistician 16, no. 6:1-3; no. 7:4-6. -» Published posthumously. 1965 GUTTMAN, IRWIN; and WILKS, SAMUEL S. Introductory Engineering Statistics. New York: Wiley. -» Published posthumously. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
ANDERSON, T. W. 1965a Samuel Stanley Wilks: 19061964. Annals of Mathematical Statistics 36:1-23. ANDERSON, T. W. 1965b The Publications of S. S. Wilks. Annals of Mathematical Statistics 36:24-27. COCHRAN, W. G. 1964 S. S. Wilks. International Statistical Institute, Review 32:189-191. CRAIG, CECIL C. 1964 Professor Samuel S. Wilks. Industrial Quality Control 20, no. 12:41 only. GULLIKSEN, HAROLD 1964 Samuel Stanley Wilks: 19061964. Psychometrika 29:103-104. MOSTELLER, FREDERICK 1964 Samuel S. Wilks: Statesman of Statistics. American Statistician 18, no. 2: 11-17. PEARSON, E. S. 1964 Samuel Stanley Wilks: 1906-1964. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A 127: 597-599. STEPHAN, FREDERICK F. et al. 1965 Samuel S. Wilks. Journal of the American Statistical Association 60: 939-966. -> Other contributors were J. W. Tukey, F. Mosteller, A. M. Mood, M. H. Hansen, L. E. Simon, and W. J. Dixon. TUKEY, JOHN W. 1965 Samuel Stanley Wilks: 19061964. Pages 147-154 in American Philosophical Society, Yearbook, 1964. Philadelphia: The Society.
WILLCOX, WALTER F. Walter Francis Willcox (1861-1964), American statistician, lived 103 years, was a persistent walker, and even after his ninetieth birthday attended meetings of the International Statistical Institute in Rio de Janeiro, New Delhi, and Stockholm. Such durability attracts attention, and Willcox was afraid that he would be remembered more for his feet than for his head. Actually, he deserves an outstanding place among American social scientists and statisticians as a pioneer teacher-scholar in demography. Willcox played a major role in transforming the academic approach to social questions from one based on law guided by philosophy to one based on factual investigation guided by provisional theory. His work in social science grew out of a revolt against philosophy. Having studied philosophy and
554
WILLCOX, WALTER F.
law at Amherst College and Columbia University (Amherst awarded him an A.B. in 1884 and an A.M. in 1888; Columbia awarded him an LL.B. in 1887 and a PH.D. in 1891), in 1889 he went to Berlin, where he began a thesis on divorce. He approached the subject in the tradition of natural law, as a study of practical ethics, until he encountered Bertillon's Etude demographique du divorce (1883). Its empirical method opened up a new world to him, and its substance completely overturned his former convictions. After returning to the United States, he applied Bertillon's method to the American data that Carroll D. Wright, then commissioner of labor, had published in A Report on Marriage and Divorce 1867-1906 in the United States (see U.S. Bureau of the Census 1908-1909). The result was a major work, The Divorce Problem: A Study in Statistics (1891). In 1891 Willcox joined the faculty of Cornell University, at first teaching statistics in a philosophy course entitled "Applied Ethics." He remained at Cornell for forty years, becoming professor of economics and statistics in 1901 and retiring in 1931. Willcox's writings ranged widely over the field of demography, covering birth, death, marriage, divorce, migration, the composition of population, and problems of method relating both to censuses and to vital statistics. He tended to study topics of practical importance, which he treated carefully with simple, yet imaginative, manipulative faciliity and presented as lucidly as possible without showmanship. Much of his work is dated, as indeed he asserted it would be, but much of it is remarkably fresh. His studies were valuable in themselves, often illuminating for the first time diverse problems of American society. But perhaps more important, the fact that he brought statistics to bear on sociology made it possible for later scholars, with access to vastly improved data, to probe more deeply into social problems and their interrelationships. Of Willcox's studies, the two whose relevance is probably the least dated are the one on the population of China (see 1930a) and the one on the measurement of fertility (see 1910-1911). The former study provided the documentation to which most discussions of China's population continue to refer. In the latter, Willcox's measurement was based on the ratio of children under age five to women of childbearing age. The United States did not have complete registration of births until 1933, and Willcox used his ratio, which he obtained from the decennial census, to make the point that the birth rate in the United States had been declining, at least since the early years of the nineteenth cen-
tury. Willcox was probably the first to employ this ratio, which is now widely used as a measure of fertility whenever birth registration data are not available or are incomplete. Outside the field of demography, Willcox turned his attention to economic productivity, problems of public health and social welfare, the role of social statistics as an aid to the courts, public opinion and Prohibition legislation, the history of statistics and biographical sketches of early statisticians (whom he preferred to call statists, a term that in his time did not have its present meaning), and above all, the perennial problem of apportionment of representation. Willcox first became interested in apportionment in 1900 and retained this interest all his life: as late as June 1959 he testified before a subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives, and the New York Times printed a letter from him on the subject written in his 101st year. He favored apportionment based on the method of major fractions, a method that had once been used by Congress but that had subsequently been replaced by the method of equal proportions. It was probably more through Willcox's efforts than through those of any other single person that the law now provides for automatic apportionment when Congress fails to act. From 1899 to 1901 Willcox was one of five professional statisticians in charge of the twelfth, or 1900, census of the United States. He served as chief of the division of methods and results and was responsible for providing supplementary analyses of the data gathered in the census. These analytical investigations were the prototypes of what are now called census monographs. He and his staff issued reports on such topics as age statistics, proportions of children in the population, Negroes, illiteracy, and teachers; in 1906 the monumental Supplementary Analysis and Derivative Tables, 12th Census (see U.S. Bureau of the Census 1906) appeared. In addition to serving as a chief statistician for the census, Willcox served on the Board of Health of New York State from 1899 to 1902, as statistical expert for the War Department on the census of Cuba and Puerto Rico during 1899/1900, as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell from 1902 to 1907, and as president of the American Statistical Association in 1912 and of the American Economic Association in 1915. He was particularly interested in international statistics and was elected president of the International Statistical Institute in 1947. FRANK W. NOTESTEIN
WILLOUGHBY, WESTEL WOODBURY [Directly related are the entries CENSUS; LIFE TABLES; GOVERNMENT STATISTICS; POPULATION; and the biography of BERTILLON.] WORKS BY WILLCOX
(1891) 1897 The Divorce Problem: A Study in Statistics. 2d ed. Columbia University, Faculty of Political Science, Studies in History, Economics and Public Law, Vol. 1, No. 1. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. 1894 The Relation of Statistics to Social Science. National Conference of Charities and Correction, Annual Report 21:86-93. 1897 Density and Distribution of Population in the United States at the Eleventh Census. American Economic Association, Economic Studies, Vol. 2, No. 6. New York: Macmillan. 1910-1911 The Change in the Proportion of Children in the United States and in the Birth Rate in France During the Nineteenth Century. American Statistical Association, Publications 12:490-499. H> Since 1914 called the Journal of the American Statistical Association. (1930a) 1931 A Westerner's Effort to Estimate the Population of China and Its Increase Since 1650. International Statistical Institute, Bulletin 25, Part 3:156-170. -» First published in the Journal of the American Statistical Association. 1930b Census. Volume 3, pages 295-300 in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences. New York: Macmillan. 1933 Introduction to the Vital Statistics of the United States, 1900 to 1930. Washington: Government Printing Office. Studies in American Demography. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1940. ->• Contains writings first published in the decades prior to 1940, as well as previously unpublished material. See especially pages 541-547 for a bibliography of the more important writings of Willcox. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
BERTILLON, JACQUES 1883 Etude demographique du divorce et de la separation de corps dans les differents pays de I'Europe. Paris: Masson. LEONARD, WILLIAM R. 1961 Walter F. Willcox: Statist. American Statistician 15:16-19. RICE, STUART A. 1964 Walter Francis Willcox: March 22, 1861-October 30, 1964. American Statistician 18: 25-26. U.S. BUREAU OF THE CENSUS 1906 Supplementary Analysis and Derivative Tables: Twelfth Census of the United States. Washington: Government Printing Office. U.S. BUREAU OF THE CENSUS 1908-1909 A Report on Marriage and Divorce 1867-1906 in the United States, by Carroll D. Wright. 2 vols. Washington: Government Printing Office.
WILLOUGHBY, WESTEL WOODBURY The career of Westel Woodbury Willoughby (1867-1945) spanned much of the early history of the political science profession in the United States. He began teaching at Johns Hopkins University in 1894 and remained there until his retirement in
555
1933. During Willoughby's tenure, Johns Hopkins was one of the principal centers of graduate training in political science in the United States. But Willoughby also exerted influence on the profession in his capacity as secretary-treasurer of the American Political Science Association, which he helped to organize in 1903. He held this position for ten years and was elected president of the organization in 1913. In addition, he was for a time managing editor of the American Political Science Review. Willoughby, like his contemporaries, saw political science primarily as a deductive discipline. The most important task of the scholar was to discover the fundamental principles underlying the role of governmental institutions in society. Once this rationale was understood, men could proceed to organize and operate their political institutions in accordance with sound criteria. Since Willoughby regarded the state essentially as an ethical enterprise, these principles were at least partially normative in character. In conformity with the classic tradition of political and legal theory, Willoughby assigned little importance to "purely descriptive" studies of the actual operation of political systems. Since the 1930s, political science has shifted markedly to the empirical study of political behavior, and consequently Willoughby's influence as a scholar has declined precipitously. Although he is often remembered as the dean of political science in the early part of this century, he is now seldom referred to in the political science literature. Willoughby's contributions to the study of political institutions are primarily in three areas: political theory, public law, and international relations. His most influential early work was in the field of political philosophy; he published An Examination of the Nature of the State in 1896 and Social Justice in 1900. These early studies were in the tradition of juristic and ethical philosophy—inquiries into the origins of political authority and the proper limits of its exercise. In the field of public law the most important of his contributions was a twovolume treatise, The Constitutional Law of the United States, published in 1910. In the latter portion of his career much of Willoughby's work lay in the area of international law and international relations. Following his service in 1916 as constitutional adviser to the president of the recently established Chinese Republic, Willoughby published several books bearing on the Chinese position in the international community, including Foreign Rights and Interests in China (1920) and The SinoJapanese Controversy and the League of Nations (1935). He also served on several other occasions in an advisory capacity to the Chinese government.
556
WILSON, WOODROW
It may well be that Willoughby's contributions to scholarship were ultimately less significant than his more practical activities as a political scientist. FRANCIS E. ROURKE [See also PRESIDENTIAL GOVERNMENT; PUBLIC LAW, article on THE FIELD.] WORKS BY WILLOUGHBY
There is a collection of Willoughby's papers in the Johns Hopkins University library. 1896 An Examination of the Nature of the State: A Study in Political Philosophy. New York: Macmillan. 1900 Social Justice: A Critical Essay. New York: Macmillan. 1903 The Political Theories of the Ancient World. New York: Longmans. 1904 The American Constitutional System: An Introduction to the Study of the American State. New York: Century. (1910) 1929 The Constitutional Law of the United States. 2d ed. 2 vols. New York: Baker, Voorhis. (1912) 1930 Principles of the Constitutional Law of the United States. 2d ed. New York: Baker, Voorhis. -> An abridgement of Willoughby (1910). 1918 Prussian Political Philosophy: Its Principles and Implications. New York: Appleton. (1920) 1927 Foreign Rights and Interests in China. 2d ed., rev. & enl. 2 vols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. 1930 The Ethical Basis of Political Authority. New York: Macmillan. 1935 The Sino-Japanese Controversy and the League of Nations. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
MATTHEWS, JOHN M.; and HART, J. (editors) 1937 Essays in Political Science in Honor of Westel Woodbury Willoughby. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.
WILSON, WOODROW Thomas Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924), political scientist and 28th president of the United States, made his professional contributions to political science between 1879, when he was a senior at Princeton, and 1908, when he published Constitutional Government in the United States. Between these dates, he also attended the University of Virginia Law School, practiced law for a year in Atlanta, Georgia, and then abandoned the bar for graduate work at Johns Hopkins University, where he received the doctorate of philosophy in 1886. Wilson taught history and political science at Bryn Mawr College and Wesleyan University before he returned to Princeton in 1890 as professor; in 1902 he became president of the university. After his academic career, Wilson had a second distinguished career as governor of New Jersey and president of the United States, the only two political offices for which he ever campaigned.
In the development of political science as a discipline distinct from history and moral philosophy, Wilson's work is a bridge between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although, like John W. Burgess and Theodore Dwight Woolsey, he was interested in systematic statements about political theory, Wilson, more than they, attempted to build upon empirical evidence. His most important work in this vein, The State (1889), was one of the first books on comparative government written in the United States, although it is not, by twentiethcentury standards, a behavioral study and is empirical in only a secondhand sense. Little of The State is based upon direct observation of foreign systems. As Wilson's Preface indicates, the principal materials for his comparative study were borrowed from a German yearbook on public law (Handbuch des offentlichen Rechts der Gegenwart) edited by Heinrich Marquardsen of the University of Erlangen. Insofar as its theory is concerned, The State owes something to the concepts of process and evolution associated with Darwin and to the sociology of Herbert Spencer: for example, Wilson believed that the modern state had emerged from competition between earlier, more primitive forms of social organization, a struggle in which the fittest customs and the best religions had prevailed. [See the biography of SPENCER.] As a political scientist, Wilson was primarily interested in the study of the government of the United States. Here, as in the field of comparative government, he was a pioneer. An article published when he was a senior in college and titled "Cabinet Government in the United States" (1879) has serious shortcomings as a piece of empirical work, but Wilson seems to have been the first American political scientist to examine critically the functions of Congress and its inner working, although such discussion was not uncommon in the opinion press of the day. Wilson did not obtain his material either by the method of direct observation or by research into original documents; his statements about Congress were based on his insight, now accepted as undeniable, that the American political system cannot operate well without vigorous presidential leadership. Although other sources have been credited with shaping Wilson's thought on executive leadership through political parties (e.g., Henry Jones Ford, Rise and Growth of American Politics, 1898), his earliest and most enduring debt was to Walter Bagehot, whose work The English Constitution described the model which, in the 1880s, Wilson thought the United States should emulate. Wilson's argument for cabinet government in the 1879 article was expanded in another
WILSON, WOODROW article, "Committee or Cabinet Government" (1884), and he then published a book on the roles of Congress and the president in the American system, under the title Congressional Government (1885). In this book Wilson expressed considerable pessimism about the weakening effects on the presidency of the separation of powers, the committee system in Congress, and the nomination of presidential candidates by party convention; eventually, he became less pessimistic, and in the Preface to the fifteenth edition of Congressional Government, published in 1900, he thought that the war with Spain had shown that the president had unique powers. By 1908, in Constitutional Government in the United States, he was sanguine about the capability of a strong man to act as a strong president and no longer felt that the chief executive was doomed to ineffectuality by the limitations of the constitutional system and the political party structure. Still another field in which Wilson pioneered was public administration. In 1887 he published an article titled "The Study of Administration," which seems to have attracted little notice at the time but which, some sixty years later, was to be mentioned by Dwight Waldo as "the most distinguished essay —of such brief compass, at least—in the history of American public administration" (Wilson [1887] 1953, p. 64). In this essay Wilson made the distinction, no longer generally accepted, between administration and politics. He acknowledged his indebtedness for this distinction to European writers on politics and law, notably Johann Kaspar Bluntschli. In later statements, Wilson made it clear that although he believed that administrators were not in principle involved in the political process, he was strongly opposed to the creation of a bureaucratic elite not subject to democratic controls. Although Wilson's reputation in history as a progressive reformer is well sustained by the domestic programs of the "New Freedom" and by his initiative in the establishment of a permanent League of Nations, he was, paradoxically, quite conservative in temper. He admired Edmund Burke as well as Walter Bagehot, saw political process as organic growth, and showed a sensitivity to the historical aspects of political phenomena. In economic matters, he was for a long time an admirer of the Manchester liberals; in civil rights, he supported segregation; and he was unenthusiastic about extending the franchise to women. In his larger political views, he rejected the Whig theory of politics, which he described in Constitutional Government in the United States as "a sort of unconscious copy of the Newtonian theory of the universe." The
557
trouble with this theory was that it treated government as a machine, not a living thing. He believed that political theory is "accountable to Darwin," not to Newton. Wilson was saved from a passive determinism by his strong religious convictions. He was the son of a Presbyterian minister and his political activism was rooted in the Calvinist drive to serve God and to understand his will through rational effort. According to this religious view of life, God is best served by serving man. An abiding sense of moral purpose lent energy to the program of domestic reforms which Wilson pressed forward with vigor and skill between 1913 and 1917; to his leadership of the war effort in 1917 and 1918; and to his vision of a moral world in eternal peace in 1919 and 1920. In his administrations as president of the United States, Wilson established the style for the office which subsequent presidents have regarded as the standard for strong leadership. He continued to enact the various presidential roles of the past—those of party leader and voice of the people, for example— and he developed new ones: the president as protector of the peace, as chief legislator and diplomat, as planner of the economy, and as a leader of free nations. As Rossiter has noted, it has been asserted by many historians that in Wilson's first term the "American Presidency, and with it our whole system of government, reached its highest peak of democracy, efficiency, and morality" ([1956] 1960, p. 104). EARL LATHAM [For the historical context of Wilson's work, see the biographies of BAGEHOT; BURKE; SPENCER. Directly related to Wilson's interests are POLITICS, COMPARATIVE; PRESIDENTIAL GOVERNMENT; PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION.] WORKS BY WILSON (1879) 1925 Cabinet Government in the United States. Volume 1, pages 19-42 in Woodrow Wilson, The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson. Edited by Ray S. Baker and William E. Dodd. New York: Harper. (1884) 1925 Committee or Cabinet Government. Volume 1, pages 95-129 in Woodrow Wilson, The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson. Edited by Ray S. Baker and William E. Dodd. New York: Harper. -» First published in Volume 3, Series 2, of the Overland Magazine. (1885) 1961 Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics. New York: Meridian. (1887) 1953 The Study of Administration. Pages 65-75 in Dwight Waldo (editor), Ideas and Issues in Public Administration: A Book of Readings. New York: McGraw-Hill. -» See page 64 for Dwight Waldo's introduction to Wilson's article. (1889) 1918 The State: Elements of Historical and Practical Politics. Boston: Heath.
558
WIRTH, LOUIS
(1908) 3917 Constitutional Government in the Vnited States, New York: Columbia Univ. Press. A Day of Dedication: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Woodrow Wilson. New York: Macmillan, 1965. The Papers of Woodrow Wilson. Vol 1. Edited by Arthur S. Link. Princeton Univ. Press, 1966. -» Additional volumes are in preparation, The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson. Edited by Ray S. Baker and William E. Dodd. 6 vols. New York: Harper, 1925-1927. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY BAKER, RAY S. (1922) 1960 Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement: Written From His Unpublished and Personal Material. 3 vols. Gloucester, Mass.: Smith. BUEHRIG, EDWARD H. 1957 Wilson's Foreign Policy in Perspective. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press. HOLLINGSWORTH, WILLIAM W. 1918 Woodrow Wilson's Political Ideals as Interpreted From His Works. Princeton Univ. Press. HOOVER, HERBERT C. 1958 The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson. New York: McGraw-Hill. KERNEY, JAMES 1926 The Political Education of Woodrow Wilson. New York and London: Century. LATHAM, EARL (editor) 1958 The Philosophy and Policies of Woodrow Wilson. Univ. of Chicago Press. LINK, ARTHUR S. 1947-1965 Wilson. 4 vols. Princeton Univ. Press. ROSSITER, CLINTON L. (1956) 1960 The American Presidency. 2d ed. New York: Harcourt.
WIRTH, LOUIS Louis Wirth (1897-1952), American sociologist, was born to relatively prosperous Jewish parents in a rural village of Germany; he remained there unti] he was 14 years old, when he emigrated to the United States. After attending public school in Omaha, Nebraska, he went to the University of Chicago, where he received his A.B., M.A., and PH.D. Wirth's commitment to social reform, which began when he was young, was reinforced by the general atmosphere at Chicago and by the influences of Albion W. Small and the Marxist antiwar groups with which he worked during World War I. He became a sociologist because he believed that a science of human behavior was not only possible but indispensable to social betterment. This combined interest in sociology and social action lasted all his life and was reflected both in the jobs he held and in his scholarly work. He served as a professional social worker and as a consultant to local and federal policy-makers and administrators. He was a founder and a director of the American Council on Race Relations, a public lecturer, and a professor at the University of Chicago. As a product of the University of Chicago tradition of Park, Burgess, Thomas, and Small, Wirth conceived of sociology both as a general science and as a specific discipline (Odum 1951, pp. 228-229).
He viewed sociology as a general science in that its questions cut across different specific contexts, accenting the group factor in human behavior, and as a specific discipline in that historical accident had allotted to it certain residual fields of inquiry. Like Park and Burgess, Wirth divided sociology into (1) demography, ecology, and technology; (2) social organization; and (3) social psychology. The first area of investigation covers the foundations of social existence—for example, size and composition of population aggregates, and the physical and technological bases of life—while the third area covers the study of personality, attitudes, motivations, and collective behavior. Between the two areas lies the field of social organization, which is concerned with such constituent elements of social life as communities, institutions, and classes. Wirth considered himself a theorist, but he stressed that theory is not a body of knowledge separate from research and practice. Rather, it is an aspect of everything sociologists do—an aspect of their very interests, of the assumptions with which they start, and of the conceptual framework they use to collect and to analyze materials. Wirth believed that sociology is "the study of what is true of man by virtue of the fact that everywhere and always he lives a group life." He was particularly interested in the bases of group life: the interplay between competition and communication, between the symbiotic order and the cultural order, and between the ecological community and the moral community. Therefore he saw the study of consensus (the capacity for deliberate collective action) as the central task of sociology. "Because the mark of any society is the capacity of its members to understand one another and to act in concert toward common objectives and under common norms, the analysis of consensus rightly constitutes the focus of sociological investigations" (1948, p. 2). Wirth's commitment to individual freedom led him to examine the degree of consensus necessary to maximize individual freedom as well as the degree of such freedom necessary to maximize collective action based on shared understandings. He suggested that the knowledge of the social scientist should be made effective by the development of an art of creating public consent—or consensus— based on communication, discussion, debate, negotiation, and compromise. After theory, Wirth's principal interest was ecology, particularly the ecology of the human community. His work for the National Resources Planning Board, especially the volume Our Cities: Their Role in the National Economy (U.S. National Re-
WISSLER, CLARK sources Committee 1937), represents an early effort to bring the findings of the social sciences to bear on the making of national policy. In the now classic "Urbanism as a Way of Life" (1938) he set forth a theoretical framework for the sociological analysis of urban life. Another favorite topic of Wirth's was the sociology of intellectual life. In his "Introduction" to the 1936 edition of Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia he discussed a series of interrelated issues in this area, focusing on knowledge as a social product, the role of belief systems and ideologies, the effect of thought on social life, and the social organization of intellectual life. Wirth's belief in social action led him to work in the fields of housing, planning, and minority problems and race relations. Of the last he wrote that "our action has so far outrun our knowledge that we must concentrate our efforts for some time to come on fundamental research concerning the nature and functioning of prejudice and antipathy, on problems of discrimination, on segregation, and on intergroup tensions and conflicts that furnish a more reliable basis for social action" (quoted in Odum 1951, p. 232). Wirth was a president of the American Sociological Association and the first president of the International Sociological Association. His lasting impact is on the social sciences insofar as they are policy sciences and derives from his insistence that knowledge generally cannot be separated from social action, nor can sociology be separated from the problems and the ongoing processes of society.
ELEANOR BERNERT SHELDON [For the historical context of Wirth's work, see ECOLOGY, article on HUMAN ECOLOGY; and the biographies of BURGESS; PARK; SMALL; THOMAS; for discussion of the subsequent development of Wirth's ideas, see CITY; COMMUNICATION, MASS; MINORITIES; NEIGHBORHOOD.]
WORKS BY WIRTH 1928
The Ghetto. Univ. of Chicago Press. -» A paperback edition was published in 1956. (1936) 1954 Introduction. In Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Harcourt. 1937 Localism, Regionalism and Centralization. American Journal of Sociology 42:403-509. 1938 Urbanism as a Way of Life. American Journal of Sociology 44:1-24. 1938 CHICAGO, RECREATION COMMISSION Local Community Fact Book: 1938. Edited by Louis Wirth and Margaret Furez. Chicago: The Commission. 1939 Social Interaction: The Problem of the Individual and the Group. American Journal of Sociology 44: 965-979.
559
1940
Ideological Aspects of Social Disorganization. American Sociological Review 5:472-482. 1941 The Present Position of Minorities in the United States. Pages 137-157 in Pennsylvania, University of, Bicentennial Conference, Studies in Political Science and Sociology. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press. 1942 Urban Communities. American Journal of Sociology 47:829-839. 1945a Human Ecology. American Journal of Sociology 50:483-488. 1945i> The Problem of Minority Groups. Pages 347-372 in Ralph Linton (editor), The Science of Man in the World Crisis. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. 1948 Consensus and Mass Communication. American Sociological Review 13:1-15. 1949 WIRTH, Louis; and BERNERT, ELEANOR B. (editors) Local Community Fact Book of Chicago. Univ of Chicago Press. Louis Wirth on Cities and Social Life: Selected Papers. Edited by Albert J. Reiss, Jr. Univ. of Chicago Press, 1964. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
BENDIX, REINHARD 1954 Social Theory and Social Action in the Sociology of Louis Wirth. American Journal of Sociology 59:523-529. ODUM, HOWARD W. 1951 American Sociology: The Story of Sociology in the United States Through 1950. New York: Longmans. -» See especially pages 227-233. U.S. NATIONAL RESOURCES COMMITTEE 1937 Our Cities: Their Role in the National Economy. Report of the Urbanism Committee to the National Resources Committee. Washington: Government Printing Office.
WISSLER, CLARK Clark Wissler (1870-1947) was a man of varied interests and activities.- his contributions were in physical anthropology, ethnography and ethnology, museum administration, and teaching. He taught in public schools before taking a college degree; then he obtained a PH.D. in psychology at Columbia University. His studies were encouraged by James McKeen Cattell, and he also became acquainted with Franz Boas; later he and Boas were associates on the staff of the American Museum of Natural History. From 1924 to 1940 Wissler taught at Yale. Wissler's early work was in physical anthropology. "The Hard Palate in Normal and Feeble-minded Individuals" (1908), a study coauthored with Walter Channing, is an analysis, based on plaster casts, which shows that no statistically significant differences can be established between the two groups considered. With Boas, Wissler measured the height, head length, and head width of school children in Worcester, Massachusetts, presenting the data by sex and by age level. Later Wissler dealt with metric changes during growth, includ-
560
WISSLER, CLARK
ing in his study an analysis of Louis R. Sullivan's measurements of children in Hawaii (1930). These anthropometric studies prepared the ground for new concepts of population dynamics and individual differentiation and came to replace earlier static classifications. During this time Wissler was becoming acquainted with a variety of anthropological materials, descriptions, and interpretations. As curator of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History, he was responsible for collections and exhibits of tribal arts and handicrafts. Following Boas' lead, he arranged exhibits by region and tribe, rather than by type. This represented an important change in museology, and it contributed to the development of the concept of culture area. Wissler was especially interested in the North American Plains tribes, and carried out field work in that region. Within a decade or two the Great Plains was the most thoroughly studied region in North America, perhaps in the tribal world. His principal field work was with the Blackfoot. Wissler's excellent descriptions of their culture reveal his very early interest in the psychological aspects of behavior and in values, and include accounts of myths and tales, material culture, and social organization. He was among the first to publish an account of so-called joking relationships. Among the tales recorded is an unusual one—the tale of a warrior who spared the occupants of an enemy tepee because a child in it had offered him food; Wissler noted that this tale often stimulated the Blackfoot to debate the ethics of the warrior's behavior. Aspects of Plains culture which especially interested Wissler include the Sun Dance, accounts of which, for several tribes, were collated under his auspices; material culture, particularly moccasins and clothing; and art designs. He described the transformation of aspects of Plains culture as a result of the acquisition of the horse and traced, from documents, the spread of horseback riding among Plains tribesmen. Wissler was among the first to emphasize and illustrate the importance of early historical records. Concurrent and continuing interests were the significance of regional clusterings of certain traits and the relation between physical environment and culture. In The American Indian (1917) he outlined the principal culture regions; as criteria for delineating areas he used mainly the characteristics of the physical environment and the distinctive elements of material culture. He indicated the distribution of certain traits and their regional adaptations. In Man and Culture (1923) and The Relation of Nature to Man in Aboriginal America
(1926) he further discussed diffusion and adaptation, and adduced two principles: one has to do with the manner in which traits spread; the other, with the inference of the relative age of traits from the extent of their distribution. Wissler suggested a patterning of diffusion: A trait spreads in all directions, as waves move out in circles when a stone is dropped into a quiet pool; hence, the greater the spread, the older the trait. A trait is most elaborated at and near its place of origin, and least at the periphery. As an example, he cited the Plains Sun Dance, which in some tribes had a greater number of constituent traits in the complex than it had in others. The most elaborate expression of the Sun Dance revealed its place of origin. Wissler recorded no exceptions to his patterns, nor did he indicate why diffusion could not have taken place from the periphery to the center. His age-area concept stimulated the compilation of trait distribution lists but never contributed to the formulation of historical or functional interpretations (Woods 1934). Considering his penchant for scientific procedure, demonstrated in his work in physical anthropology, it is remarkable that Wissler did not test his hypotheses more carefully (see Wallis 1930, pp. 63-76). His findings regarding the introduction of the horse to North American tribes should have made him pause before placing so much reliance on nonhistorical data, since he surely knew that in many instances, about which there is documentary or other cogent evidence, the extent of distribution is not positively correlated with the age of the trait. In spite of the outdatedness of Wissler's theories, he is important for his wide-ranging activities in anthropology. As Murdock noted (1948, p. 295), Wissler, more than any other anthropologist of his generation "bridged the gap between the narrow isolationism of the Boas period and the rich and fertile vitality of the anthropology of today."
WILSON D. WALLIS [See also DIFFUSION, article on CULTURAL DIFFUSION; PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY. Other relevant material may be found in the biography of BOAS.] WORKS BY WISSLER
1908
CHANNING, WALTER; and WISSLER, CLARK The Hard Palate in Normal and Feeble-minded Individuals. Volume 1, part 5, in American Museum of Natural History, Anthropological Papers. New York: The Museum. (1912) 1948 North American Indians of the Plains. 3d ed. Handbook Series, No. 1. New York: American Museum of Natural History.
WOOD WORTH, ROBERT S. (1917) 1957 The American Indian: An Introduction to the Anthropology of the New World. 3d ed. Gloucester, Mass.: Smith. 1923 Man and Culture. New York: Crowell. 1926 The Relation of Nature to Man in Aboriginal America. New York and London: Oxford Univ. Press. 1929 An Introduction to Social Anthropology. New York: Holt. 1930 Growth of Children in Hawaii: Based on Observations by Louis R. Sullivan. Bernice P. Bishop Museum, Memoirs, Vol. 11, No. 2. Honolulu, Hawaii: The Museum. 1938 Indian Cavalcade: Or, Life on the Old-time Indian Reservations. New York: Sheridan House. (1940) 1949 Indians of the United States: Four Centuries of Their History and Culture. American Museum of Natural History, Science Series. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
DIXON, ROLAND B. 1928 The Building of Cultures. New York: Scribner. -» See especially pages 167-180. MURDOCK, GEORGE P. 1948 Clark Wissler, 1870-1947. American Anthropologist New Series 50:292-304. -» Contains an extensive bibliography. SHAPIRO, HARRY L. 1947 Clark Wissler, 1870-1947. Pages 300-302 in American Philosophical Society, Yearbook. Philadelphia: The Society. WALLIS, WILSON D. 1930 Culture and Progress. New York: McGraw-Hill. WOODS, C. A. 1934 A Criticism of Wissler's North American Culture Areas. American Anthropologist New Series 36:517-523.
WIT See HUMOR. WITCHCRAFT See MAGIC. WOMEN See INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES, article on SEX DIFFERENCES; LABOR FORCE, article OU PARTICIPATION.
WOODWORTH, ROBERT S. Robert Sessions Woodworth (1869-1962) was for many years the dean of American psychologists. He was the most influential exponent of the functionalist viewpoint characteristic of the mainstream of psychology in the United States. His work consisted chiefly of the interpretation of experimental findings about behavior—perceiving, learning, and motivation—and he based his interpretations on the capacity of the objectively organized organism to register, evaluate, and come to grips with its environment. Woodworth was born in Belchertown, Massachusetts, into a family with roots deep in colonial New
561
England. His father, William Walter Woodworth, was a Congregationalist minister, much preoccupied with church duties; he died when Woodworth was 20 and a junior in college. For a time young Woodworth seriously considered following his father into the clergy, but he ultimately chose a teaching career. Woodworth's mother, Lydia Ames (Sessions), was a college teacher and president; Woodworth was the eldest of her three sons and followed closely in her footsteps with his interests in mathematics, philosophy, and botany, all subjects that she had taught. Development of ideas From a one-room schoolhouse in Berlin, Connecticut, Woodworth went to high school in Newton, Massachusetts, where the college preparatory curriculum consisted mainly of courses in classics, with some mathematics. Although students from Newton High generally went to Harvard, Woodworth decided on Amherst as more suitable for a "religiously inclined young man." There, in his senior year, a "remarkable psychology course" caught his imagination—a course, actually, in philosophy, given by Charles Edward Carman, who communicated to his students the importance of science in finding the solutions to fundamental philosophical issues. On graduation from Amherst in 1891 Woodworth won a prize in mathematics that would have helped finance a year of graduate study at Harvard; but since he did not wish to burden his now widowed mother with financial responsibilities, he decided to interrupt his studies in order to earn some money. After teaching high school geometry, physics, and chemistry, he became chairman of the mathematics department of Washburn College, Topeka, Kansas. His teaching experience helped him to consolidate the mathematical skills that he later found so useful in his psychological work. In evaluating his own scientific contributions Woodworth regarded some of his statistical insights as the most original. While he was at Washburn College, Woodworth came under the influence of G. Stanley Hall, through the latter's writings and lectures. Woodworth was especially struck with Hall's emphasis on investigation. Yet when he finally went to Harvard for graduate study in 1895, he was still wavering between his interest in mathematics and his interest in philosophy and psychology: it was the influence of William James that was decisive in his choice of psychology. Under James's guidance Woodworth studied general and abnormal psychology. He was intrigued by problems of thinking and,
562
WOODWORTH, ROBERT S.
while still a student, developed the notion, in opposition to the then current theory of Max Miiller, that thinking is not exclusively a function of verbal mechanisms. The development of this idea foreshadowed Woodworth's part in the imagelessthought movement. Along with his strong interest in rational thinking went an equally strong curiosity about dreams. Here he anticipated Freud in considering the dream to be the result of perseverating wishes; however, his theory rested on a broader base than Freud's, inasmuch as he believed that wishes underlying dreams might pertain to any area of interest. While he was.a student, Woodworth became concerned with the psychology of motivation, which is basic to the psychology of thinking and dreaming. He was dissatisfied with the fuzziness of theories of motivation and attempted a behavioral definition. His central thesis was that an activity, once aroused, is itself motivating; a mechanism, in his own words, may become a drive. His interest in motivation was shared by Edward L. Thorndike, a fellow student at Harvard, who became his collaborator in an important study of learning and his closest friend for the next half century. During his first two years at Harvard Woodworth continued to study philosophy under Josiah Royce, as well as psychology; after this, he felt he had to acquire a knowledge of physiology in order to pursue psychological studies. He studied physiology with Henry P. Bowditch and became acquainted with Walter B. Cannon, a fellow student. After receiving his M.A. from Harvard in 1897 Woodworth went to Columbia University for his doctorate under James McKeen Cattell, whom he came to regard as the most influential of all his teachers in shaping his psychological thinking. Cattell stressed quantitative experiments and the development of tests of individual differences, and when Woodworth succeeded him as chairman of the department at Columbia, the general orientation of the work there remained the same. Meanwhile Woodworth's training was supplemented by work in anthropology and statistical methods under Franz Boas. His broad background stood him in good stead at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, held in St. Louis in 1904, where he was in charge of a pioneer study of racial differences. Woodworth's interest in physiology took him to Edinburgh in 1900 for a summer's study with E. A. Sharpey-Schafer. He went abroad again in 1902— this time to Liverpool as Sherrington's assistant, an experience that definitively shaped his later theories. It was during this trip that he met Gab-
rielle Schjoth, the Norwegian girl whom he married. A decade later, while on a semester's leave from Columbia, he traveled to Germany, still the mecca of psychologists. At Bonn he received a warm welcome from Kiilpe, with whom he joined forces in the controversy about imageless thought. The climax of this trip was a visit to the historic psychology laboratory at Leipzig; since Cattell had provided him with a letter of introduction to Wundt, Woodworth was invited to attend Wundt's lectures. Contributions to psychology Woodworth's contributions can best be presented by showing what answers he gave to five central questions. (1) Should introspective reports be excluded from the data of psychology? For Woodworth such reports, properly used, were an indispensable tool: The concept of visual after-image, for example, cannot be validated unless the subject's report is accepted as evidence of a visual event. Therefore the complete operation cannot be stated in objective terms. But the same thing seems to be true of any scientific operation. Always there is an observer reporting what he sees or hears. Always this private event is an essential part of the whole operation. ([1931] 1948, p. 119) (2) What concepts are to be used to describe behavior? Woodworth held that an organism is primarily adjusting to a world of objects and not merely responding to stimuli: We now have the background for combining the two formulas . . . [symbolizing] by W-O-W the active giveand-take relations between the individual and his environment, and by S—O—R the fact that activity consists in making muscular responses to stimuli received. . . . So we obtain the final formula: The small w attached to O symbolizes the individual's adjustment to the environment, his situation-and-goal set. The formula may be read as follows: While O is set for doing something in a certain situation he receives stimuli and makes responses, and because of his situation-and-goal set the stimuli and responses carry objective meaning, the stimuli telling him something about the situation, and the responses being aimed at objective results. (See Woodworth & Marquis 1921, p. 36 in the 1940 edition) (3) What motivates behavior? Woodworth is known for his idea that mechanisms may function as drives. In 1918 he wrote that the principal aim of his Dynamic Psychology was to show "that any mechanism . . . once it is aroused, is capable of
WOOD WORTH, ROBERT S. furnishing its own drive and also of lending drive to other connected mechanisms . . . " (p. 67). In short, the power of acquiring new mechanisms possessed by the human mind is at the same time a power of acquiring new drives; for every mechanism . . . when it has reached a degree of effectiveness without having yet become entirely automatic, is itself a drive and capable of motivating activities that lie beyond its immediate scope. (Ibid., p. 104) Years later Gordon Airport reasserted this principle in his concept of the functional autonomy of motives. And later still, Woodworth incorporated it in his behavior-primacy theory of motivation (1958). (4) What do organisms learn? Woodworth's cognitive theory of learning grew out of his functional approach to behavior. Significantly, he entitled his last discussion of the subject, "Learning the Environment." The gist of his argument is contained in his treatment of an instance of Pavlovian conditioning: The process of sequence learning in this clear example consisted of two steps: first a readiness for something to follow; second, a readiness for meat powder to follow . . . . These two steps were primarily brain activities of a receptive and perceptual sort. That is, what the dog learned was primarily an environmental sequence, a signal followed by food. (1958, p. 229) (5) What are the conditions of reinforcement? In a provocative paper entitled "Reinforcement of Perception" (1947), Woodworth proposed a way to bridge the gap between theorists who consider contiguity sufficient for learning and those who uphold the necessity of reward. Insofar as learning is perceptual, Woodworth believed, it satisfies a built-in motive. The present thesis . . . is that perception is always driven by a direct, inherent motive which might be called the will to perceive . . . . To see, to hear—to see clearly, to hear distinctly—to make out what it is one is seeing or hearing—moment by moment, such concrete, immediate motives dominate the life of relation with the environment. (1947, p. 123) This paper laid the foundation for the questionand-answer hypothesis of reinforcement developed in Woodworth's last book (1958). In retrospect it becomes clear that Woodworth, by refusing to join any of the "schools" he understood so well, developed an integrated and challenging viewpoint of his own. Although always greatly interested in research, Woodworth also made a major scientific contribution by interpreting the state of the science of psychology. Early in his career, he collaborated
563
with George Trumbull Ladd in the revision of the latter's Elements of Psychology (see Ladd & Woodworth 1887). Woodworth's own introductory textbook, Psychology (1921), the leader in its field, went through four revisions between 1921 and 1947; a fifth and last was prepared in collaboration with D. G. Marquis. Contemporary Schools of Psychology (1931) was the layman's handiest guide to that subject. His Experimental Psychology (see Woodworth & Schlosberg 1938) was for many years the standard reference for graduate students and investigators. Under Woodworth's editorship from 1906 to 1945, the Archives of Psychology published many of the doctoral dissertations written under his supervision. His tireless labors were not unrewarded by his profession. On his seventieth birthday in 1939 his colleagues at Columbia University presented him with Psychological Issues, a selection of his papers. Nineteen years later, a group of former students and associates contributed to Current Psychological Issues (see Seward & Seward 1958), another Festschrift. In 1914, Woodworth was elected president of the American Psychological Association. But the crowning glory of his career was selection in 1956 to receive the first gold medal of the American Psychological Foundation for his "unequaled contributions in shaping the destiny of scientific psychology." With characteristic modesty and a deep sense of social responsibility Woodworth accepted this distinction not for himself but as a representative of "a whole group of young psychologists—that is to say, the young psychologists of 1900."
GEORGENE H. SEWARD AND JOHN P. SEWARD [See also DRIVES; LEARNING; MOTIVATION; and the biographies of CATTELL; HALL; THORNDIKE.] WORKS BY WOODWORTH
(1887) 1911 LADD, GEORGE T.; and WOODWORTH, ROBERT S. Elements of Physiological Psychology: A Treatise of the Activities and Nature of the Mind, From the Physical and Experimental Points of View. Rev. ed. New York: Scribner. 1918 Dynamic Psychology. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. (1921) 1947 WOODWORTH, ROBERT S.; and MARQUIS, DONALD G. Psychology. 5th ed. New York: Holt. -> Woodworth was the sole author of the first four editions. (1931) 1948 Contemporary Schools of Psychology. Rev. ed. New York: Ronald Press. (1938) 1960 WOODWORTH, ROBERT S.; and SCHLOSBERG, HAROLD Experimental Psychology. Rev. ed. New York: Holt. -> Woodworth was the sole author of the 1938 edition.
564
WORK
1947
Reinforcement of Perception. American Journal of Psychology 60:119-124. 1958 Dynamics of Behavior. New York: Holt. Psychological Issues: Selected Papers of Robert S. Woodworth. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1939. -> Contains an autobiography through 1932 and a bibliography through 1938. SUPPLEMENTARY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
SEWARD, GEORGENE H.; and SEWARD, JOHN P. (editors) 1958 Current Psychological Issues: Essays in Honor of Robert S. Wood-worth. New York: Holt.
WORK See LABOR FORCE; LABOR RELATIONS; OCCUPATIONS AND CAREERS; PROFESSIONS; WORKERS.
WORK, HOURS OF See under LABOR FORCE.
WORKERS Workers are those who produce or transform goods or provide services, for their own consumption and for that of others. Money payment for work does not always accompany its performance, although this is general in advanced economies. Two problems are highlighted in analyzing workers as a social class: (1) the sources of the present position of workers in advanced economies and (2) the social and social-psychological consequences for workers of this position. The present position of workers will be related to the demands of modern technology and its associated working behavior, including managerial response in the form of industrial welfarism. The consequences for workers will be analyzed in terms of their new structural position in society as consumers and their resulting social outlook, including their class consciousness. Agricultural workers. In preindustrial societies the central problem is to find food. For the person in a subsistence economy, there are no problems of his relations to work itself, survival providing the nexus between man and his agricultural work. The circumstances of the agrarian worker change markedly when the products of his labor enter an exchange economy. This means that (1) there is a visible social division of labor in which most segments of the population consume products they do not produce; (2) the worker becomes consumer of many products not directly related to work itself; and (3) conditions of work and styles of living of persons following agricultural pursuits can be evaluated against innovation and novelty in the industrial and commercial spheres of life.
The broad result is that in an exchange economy, the agricultural worker, as distinct from a producer in a subsistence habitat, shares many characteristics with industrial and commercial workers, including a marked shift to a self image as a consumer in society and, with the mechanization of agriculture, a position of "operative" in relation to an advanced agricultural technology. Industrial and commercial workers. The influence of national economic development on the labor force can best be visualized in Figure 1. When a nation develops economically, human resources are shifted away from agriculture. Figure 1 relates the percentage of the population economically active in agriculture to the proportions employed in industry and commerce. It is based upon data for 64 nations but excludes several countries with specialized economies. The logarithmic scale is employed to emphasize the rate of change, and trend lines are estimated. As agricultural activity employs a smaller proportion of the economically active population, there is an increase in manufacturing employment, up to a maximum of about 40 per cent in a balanced, advanced economy. On the other hand, with an identical decline in agricultural employment, the proportion in commerce increases (the maximum proportion in commerce so far observed is about 20 per cent). Evidence from these 64 countries indicates that when the need for labor to produce goods and services increases, the increase is about twice as great in industry as in commerce. It is perhaps this fact alone that highlights the empirical reason for designating economically advanced economies as "industrial." Finally, it should be noted that the curves are very steeply inclined in the region of high proportions of agricultural employment, and flatten out when the agricultural portion of the economically active population falls to 40 per cent or less. This is one way of characterizing the "take-off" period in the growth of an economy. The rate of change from agricultural employment to commerce and industry is greatest at the earliest stages of the shift. Technology and working behavior The most notable feature of an advanced economy is its high level of productivity for each unit investment of human energy. This increase in productivity is largely the result of improving the effectiveness of tools and equipment used to produce goods and services. The environment of work for the worker is de-
WORKERS (A) Proportions in industry and agriculture
565
(B) Proportions in commerce and agriculture
40
40 r
30
30
20
20
y 1,0
i:
S
7
UJ
U
6
o Z
4
2
I
10
20
30
40
I I
I
50
60
-
80
100
PER CENT IN AGRICULTURE (LOGARITHMIC SCALE)
I
_L
10
20
30
40
50
60
I
80 100
PER CENT IN AGRICULTURE (LOGARITHMIC SCALE)
Figure 1 — Economically active population of 64 countries Source: International Labor Office 1959.
termined by technology. Furthermore, working behavior itself is markedly influenced by the technologies employed. A detailed consideration of the human consequences of technology in industry will (1) make clear the environment of work and (2) provide a basis for analyzing the man-machine relationship, probably the foremost analytical problem that presents itself to students of industrial social systems. Two industrial revolutions. The first industrial revolution, usually associated with the introduction of steam power into industry, was characterized by machine and process design that took man as its model. Technology was designed to do faster, or more accurately, what man could do with his own hands and brain. Man still retained two fundamental contributions to work in this system: through his technical knowledge, training, and memory, he could program machines and processes
to determine their operations, while through his senses he could monitor operations to determine their accuracy and feed back signals to correct any deviations (Dubin 1958, chapters 10 and 11). Thus, man was essential to the technology of the first industrial revolution, and machine design took this into account. Initially, the physiological limits of man were the criteria of machine design, but it was early recognized that most of the physiological work could be transferred to the machine. Then attention was turned to fitting the programming and control functions of machine operators to machine design in the most adequate manner. This took the general form of putting as much of the programming as possible into the machine by preset and predetermined speeds, feeds, and operating cycles. There remained for the "operative" minor physiological work, together with sensing operations and feedback of control signals.
566
WORKERS
The human consequences of complex machine design in factory and office were as follows (Dubin 1958, chapter 11): (1) As programming of operations became integral with the machine, there was extensive use of machine-paced work. This took the timing and pace of work out of the hands of the worker and gave rise to the image of the worker as a "cog in a machine." (2) In order to achieve high-speed output, highly specialized machines were constructed, so that the number of different operations performed by each machine became increasingly limited. This had the effect of reducing the amount of knowledge required by each worker, as well as the amount of training. The general process is known as "work simplification" or "job dilution," and it presumably is distasteful to workers because of the repetitive character of the work it generates and the resultant lack of technical challenge. (3) Successive-stage manufacture, line production, and line assembly became integral features of most industrial processes. This had as its major human consequence detachment of any given work operation from the finished product to which it contributed: men no longer saw the finished product as their own work or knew where their own work fitted into it. This presumably vitiated the sense of workmanship and pride in output. (4) Design of machines, processes, and products, and management of production became specialized activities of engineers, technical staffs, and line managers. Technical and intricate industrial knowledge became centered in a class of elite specialists whose training and operating functions effectively foreclosed entry into this class by the vast majority of industrial workers. The logic of machine design had its obvious consequences in men's behavior and reactions to industrial work. Many social critics prescribed reversals of the processes just enumerated, in order to reverse their consequences. Thus, "job enlargement" was urged as a counter to "job dilution," and "participant management" as a corrective for the growth of self-isolation of managerial elites (Argyris 1957). It is probable that none of these processes are reversible and that the social critics' solutions will have limited and temporary success. It is certain that their solutions are irrelevant to the conditions of the second industrial revolution. The second industrial revolution, sometimes called the "age of automation," has implications that are truly revolutionary for the man-machine relationship. The two unique contributions of the worker to production—ability to program opera-
tions and to sense and feed back control signals— have both been incorporated in the machine complex through automation. It is now possible to program a machine to recall from an electronic memory necessary instructions for carrying out detailed and complex operations. Similarly, it is now possible to employ mechanical and electronic feedback devices which take information from an on-going process and use this to modulate and monitor the operation by feeding corrective signals back into the process. Machines can even do what man is not capable of doing because of his physiological limitations. The fundamental feature of the second industrial revolution is thus its introduction of the great and awe-inspiring possibility that man can be substantially eliminated from the production of many goods and services. This is already a relevant problem in such an industrially advanced country as the United States. [See AUTOMATION.] These summary descriptions of how the two industrial revolutions affect man's relations with productive equipment establish the basis for a detailed consideration of the man-machine relationship. Industrial discipline. The term "industrial discipline" refers, in part, to the ability of workers to adapt to the environment of work. This involves regularity of work and work habits, acceptance of legitimate authority in the work situation, responsibility for machine care and maintenance, and responsibility for achieving designated levels and quality of output. In sociological terms, industrial discipline is the acceptance of norms of industrial and commercial work by the worker. The source of labor, when a country industrializes, must be from among people trained in and accustomed to agricultural work. The discipline of agricultural work is nature-oriented, with the rhythm of work depending on weather and season. Precision of timing in the rhythm of work distinguishes industrial employment, since interdependent jobs can be performed effectively in relation to each other only if all work stations are simultaneously filled and if the total productive process starts and stops with uniform regularity. This problem of industrial discipline was first solved in the early English factories (and still is today, under enforced labor conditions) by making a closed community of the factory. Work was carried out in compounds, where the workers worked and lived in relative isolation from the surrounding community. Our knowledge of closed institutions suggests that this was one effective means for insuring rapid development of industrial discipline
WORKERS on the part of workers who had been brought up in the countryside. That it had other, and very undesirable, consequences in the total life of workers is well illustrated by the early history of British and American factory systems (Hammond & Hammond 1917, chapter 8). Industrial discipline is particularly essential to insure the continuity of output that is possible under modern conditions of production. One of the most common obstacles to the industrialization of developing countries is the failure to inculcate adequate work discipline. Workers newly introduced to industry may not have industrial discipline sufficient to insure their daily attendance at work, their working at the appropriate time of the work cycle, and their attention to quantity and quality standards of output. Industrial training. Industrial training is concerned with inculcating specific job operations necessary to perform individual jobs. Two basic steps are involved in developing industrial training. First, there must be accurate descriptions of job operations, so that proper content may be developed for the training. This is often accomplished through job analysis and motion study of those already proficient in the task. Second, appropriate training methods must be developed in order to inculcate required technical behavior. The overwhelming emphasis in industrial training has been on teaching, rather than on learning. The pedagogy of industrial training has been focused on the most efficient means for inculcating a given work behavior. In industrial training a great deal of rote learning takes place, which is quite effective for industrial performance, but understanding "why" a particular thing is done on the job is minimized. Concern with teaching rather than learning has been further sustained by the cyclical character of industrial production, with frequent changes in models and styles requiring new work operations by already trained work forces. "How-to-do-it" teaching is well suited to work situations in which frequent retraining is necessary, since the worker does not have to learn and relearn basic principles governing his work. The choice of alternatives for countries in accomplishing industrial training is simple: job training can be undertaken in an educational institution or in industry. In the United States principal dependence has been placed on training within industry, through apprenticeship programs and special on-the-job instruction; both of these methods emphasize rote learning. In various European countries and the Soviet Union, much greater reliance has been placed on the educational system;
567
vocational training, with a "how-to-do-it" emphasis, is provided before the worker enters the labor force. The second industrial revolution is, of course, posing a major crisis for industrial training, since substantial and continuous displacement of workers by automation requires that they be retrained. With this has come a recognition that retraining will probably follow the principles of vocational education rather than the learning theories of standard educational systems. This will, of course, shorten the retraining period and make minimum intellectual demands on the retrained workers. Technology is a central feature of the environment of modern work and the way it is performed. Machine-paced work or the limitations on working behavior by cycles and operations of machines (whether or not machine-paced) are features that limit ivorking behavior. Furthermore, insofar as equipment is space-bound, or is involved in hazardous locations or operations, the total behavior of the worker in the workplace may be molded and limited. It has also been pointed out that job dilution limits the range of skills and behavior required of the worker. Specialization of tasks produces limited perspectives among workers. Finally, the classical distinction between managers and workers has been hardened by the growing gulf of education and knowledge that separates these two classes. Given these technical features of industrial work and their human consequences, we can understand two behavioral adaptations displayed by industrial and commercial workers: a marked increase in mobility between jobs and a shifting basis for calculating job satisfaction. Worker mobility and job satisfaction Where there is a free labor market and workers may voluntarily change jobs, the evidence suggests that they do this frequently in the course of a working lifetime. Data for the U.S. labor force indicate that during an average working life of 46 years, approximately nine different jobs are held. Workers in less skilled occupations change jobs more frequently than those in more skilled groups. When workers change employers, the majority also change their occupation and the industry in which they work (Palmer 1954, p. 74). This picture of very considerable mobility in a modern, free labor market contrasts sharply with the former attachment of workers to one industry, and often the same locality and company, for their entire working life. Only among itinerant workers and journeymen (the very title is descriptive) was mobility among jobs and employing organizations
568
WORKERS
characteristic. [See LABOR FORCE, article on MARKETS AND MOBILITY.] Apparently the nature of industrial employment is such that employing organizations are not committed to lifetime employment opportunities for their work forces, modern Japan being a notable exception. The individual worker usually seeks employment a number of times in the normal course of his working life. The individual worker, then, has weakened ties to any given place of employment or any given employer. Personal needs and requirements may play a significant role, as they do in the United States labor market, in determining for whom, where, and in what industry employment will be sought (Palmer 1954, p. 73); but we can conclude in general that a major characteristic of industrial and commercial labor forces in advanced economies is the high mobility of workers between places, employing organizations, and occupations. Studies of job satisfaction are based on the analysis of workers' attitudes about their jobs and correlation of this with characteristics of the work they do. In general, workers who do demanding work that is interesting, challenging, and nonrepetitive express the greatest satisfaction with their work. To improve job satisfaction, the conditions of work should be made to correspond to those of the majority of highly satisfied workers (Dubin 1958, pp. 241-243). There is no doubt of the general relationship between job satisfaction and working conditions that correlate highly with it. These working conditions do not, however, substitute for the more direct payoffs for work—money and its equivalents. Where wages are inadequate and a worker is unable to fulfill his opportunities as a consumer in the society, then his dissatisfaction with his pay will override all features of his job that might otherwise result in satisfaction. Workers in modern industrial society do not make a living; they make money and buy a living. Alienation from work. Mobility in the labor force has various economic and social consequences. Economically, if the industrial complex is to be progressive, with flexibility in locating new plants and introducing new products and production methods, then mobility in the labor force will be functional in achieving these goals. This is because labor mobility permits ease of recruitment into new industrial sectors and ready movement out of obsolescent industries. At the social level, however, the consequence of high labor mobility may be to contribute significantly to alienation from work itself. This supplements the features of technology and its human
consequences that influence the diminishing importance of work to workers. At some point in industrial development, work ceases to be a central life interest of industrial and commercial workers, and becomes instrumental in "buying a living." Worker alienation from work, however, does not mean alienation from the society in general. Indeed, detachment from work as a central life interest is likely to be accompanied by attachment to other sectors of social life. Studies of labor and leisure, for example, suggest that American workers are now in a transitional stage as they move toward attachment to sectors of social life other than work (Wilensky 1960). Part of the unevenness in this transition results from cultural lag in the social system in developing viable substitutes for work as a central life interest. A contemporary preoccupation with spectator amusements such as mass sports and television watching (characteristic of American, but also of European and Soviet workers, along with the indigenous Continental practices of communal coffee, wine, beer, and vodka drinking as collective leisure-time activities) may be only initial adjustments to a new era of substantial freedom from work. It may be that new social practices will develop to replace work as a central life interest. From the standpoint of opportunities and opportunity costs, it appears that the modern worker is finding alternative opportunities (within the limits of time available and social accessibility) for spending his life outside the work environment, and finding also that the cost of entering these nonwork areas is not prohibitive. Proceeds from working— wages and fringe benefits—together with welfare benefits derived from the state and employing organization, usually provide the wherewithal to take advantage of living opportunities outside the realm of work. Thus disengagement from work as a central life interest is possible for the first time for the mass of citizens in economically advanced countries. The enjoyment of freedom from work, once an upper class monopoly, has become a mass opportunity. Contemporary, advanced societies are at the nascent stage in developing social means to fulfill mass opportunities for freedom from preoccupation with work. The social systems of work Industrial research of the "human relations" school has emphasized that man is a social creature and that even at work his learned dependencies on social interaction must find fulfillment. The Western Electric studies confirmed that men at work would establish patterns of interaction above and beyond those necessary to get work done
WORKERS (Roethlisberger & Dickson 1939). This was labeled the "informal" aspect of the social structure of work, and there grew up a body of personnel theory which emphasized that the design of work operations and structuring of the formal organization of management should both take into account the informal sociability of working people. Insofar as technical and formal organization of men and machines thwarted opportunities for normal informal social relations, it was argued that the technical organization of work and the formal organization of management should be modified to permit natural development of informal relations. [See INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS, article on HUMAN RELATIONS.] The practical application of the "human relations" philosophy involved an insistence on job enlargement to counter job dilution dictated by technical considerations; recognition that informal solidarity among workers could be constructive as well as lead to restriction of output; and the demand that two-way communication be maximized between workers and self-isolated managers. These practical personnel policies all accorded with a democratic ethos and found substantial application, first in American industry and subsequently in European industry. There is no significant body of evidence to support the conclusion that the social structuring of work to take into account the sociability of people at work succeeded in maximizing productivity or output. Indeed, from British and American studies it appears that at best only about 15 per cent of the variability in output could be attributed to "human relations" factors. In comparative studies made where "democratic" supervision was contrasted with "autocratic" supervision, output of the compared groups was seldom significantly different; and when it was, it tended to favor autocratically led groups. The democratically led groups had more workers who expressed high job satisfaction, high regard for their supervisors, and high company loyalty (Dubin et al. 1965, chapter 1). It now seems reasonably clear that social structuring of work, when manipulated to maximize learned patterns of sociability of workers, will positively influence what can broadly be labeled worker morale. There are no grounds for believing that productivity is influenced, except in a very minor way. Productivity and motivation. It is possible to sum up the central point about workers in modern industrial societies by pointing to a fundamental trend: advances in productivity, measured in terms of man-hours employed, are independent of the willingness of the individual worker to invest energy, interest, and devotion in work. Once the
569
workers have become attuned and habituated to industrial discipline, and properly trained in performance of specific work tasks, the technologies of work (with very minor assistance from the social structuring of work relations) take care of the levels of productivity achieved. This is one of the sharply etched paradoxes of modern industrial society. Societal effectiveness in producing goods and services is independent of the willingness of individual producers. Studies have repeatedly shown the low order of relationship between individual effort and collective productivity. Indeed, it is only when workers deliberately turn their energies to hampering production, as in restriction of output for economic reasons (Mathewson 1931) or sabotage by slave labor (e.g., during World War n in Germany), that any influence on productivity becomes evident. On the positive side, the worker who is committed to high-level output as a personal goal (the "rate buster," the "Stakhanovite") achieves it as an exception rather than as a rule. This interesting conclusion is a stumbling block for social moralists and an opportunity for developing economies. Insofar as developing economies use forced methods for channeling productive energies and resources into commerce and industry, including shifting the labor force into these sectors of the economy, there seems to be some assurance that, in spite of potential lack of worker satisfaction, productivity may nonetheless increase significantly if there is adequate industrial discipline and job training. Industrialization of a country does not depend on the willingness of workers to engage themselves in industrialization. Industrial welfarism Social history and criticism have kept pace with the changing position of the worker, both in the productive sector of society and in the society as a whole. In its contemporary expression in capitalist and socialist economies alike, the orientation toward workers is based on a philosophy of welfarism. This grew out of the shared and converging social practices of welfare capitalism and the welfare orientation of socialism. When the worker was attached to production as a slave or serf, or through indentureship, managerial concern, if expressed at all, was for the creature comfort of the worker. This derived from the assumption that a healthy worker would be most productive. The Christian era of Western society sustained this managerial viewpoint by identifying suffering with physical pain and discomfort, and charity with their relief. The advent of the period of economic liberalism turned attention to man's
570
WORKERS
relationship to the state only insofar as freedom of enterprise was concerned. Under the doctrine of laissez-faire, the employer disdained any sense of noblesse oblige that survived from the earlier comfort-productivity formula, and pursued outright exploitation as a God-ordained right of the fit, the strong, and the able. Marxian criticism was strongly opposed to what it saw as the employer's "right" of exploitation; but the Marxian solution was propounded before the capitalist economy had fully developed and had brought forth the operating features of industrial welfarism. Welfare capitalism is now a dominant feature of Western economic systems, and its operating features are identical with the industrial welfarism of the socialist state. The practices of welfare capitalism rest on the assumption that the man whose creature comforts are satisfied will return gratitude to his benefactor in the form of loyalty, including sustained working effort. Since the time of Robert Owen in England, welfare capitalism has evolved into industrial welfarism, in which creature comfort of the worker is a prime focus of attention. The same operating features of industrial welfarism are displayed in socialist countries, where creature comforts in the home and community are closely related both to type of work and to performance in the work situation. In advanced capitalist enterprises, welfarism has reached high levels of refinement. Stemming from the testing of military conscripts in World War i, widespread programs have been developed for testing workers, in the hope that they might be selected to best fit the requirements of particular jobs. This is justified as increasing the effectiveness of performance for the employing organization and defending the hapless worker from needless failure at tasks for which he is not suited by ability, temperament, or training. Soviet industrial psychology had, by the 1960s, begun to accept testing and measuring of workers, as widely employed in capitalist economies. A second refinement of industrial welfarism resulted from the Western Electric researches, with their emphasis on the psyche of the worker. Especially as a consequence of the counseling program developed, personnel practice turned to treating the worker as a psychological entity whose psychic woes could be ameliorated by work-centered counseling, guidance, and minor psychotherapy. The most recent extension of the philosophy of industrial welfarism has taken the form of pleading for the individual's opportunity to achieve "selfrealization" at work. The assumption underlying
this position is that the individual who realizes his inborn potentials will be both creative on the job and willingly productive. Industrial welfarism is not directly functional in enhancing productivity and output. Such welfarism (both the capitalist and the socialist varieties) uses the place of work as the point of contact with the worker to solve some of his problems of citizenship in the larger society. In this respect the place of employment becomes the most efficient locale for remaining in continuous contact with citizens so that their problems of citizenship may be readily solved. This, of course, complements the already present disengagement of the worker from involvement in work itself as a central life interest, by providing institutional support for focusing worker interest in nonwork areas of social life. Workers as consumers Two important facts of modern life are that most goods and services are not produced by the people who consume them, and that money income or its equivalent (e.g., subsidies) is the common medium of exchange for securing consumer goods. Industrial and commercial workers are immersed in modern life and are fully responsive to its opportunities for consuming goods and services. Economic demands of workers through their unions, and social provisions for guarding level and continuity of income (unemployment insurance, job retraining, social security) have combined to make money income available to them. Indeed, since the great depression of the 1930s, economically advanced countries, including the Soviet Union, have experienced a rising level of spendable income in the hands of citizens as a result of growth of the gross national product (Galbraith 1958). The majority of these citizens are workers. The distribution systems of modern, high-output economies are important as social inventions that make workers conscious of their consumer position. Two features are notable here: modern merchandising methods and consumer credit systems. Modern merchandising methods exploit mass markets. In order to reach such markets, goods must be widely displayed and advertised to maximize the potential number of customers. Goods are openly and broadly displayed with enticements to buy that are generally unrestricted by social class of potential consumer. Modern merchandising methods are necessarily dependent upon democratization of selling and upon mass exposure to buying opportunities.
WORKERS The middle-class virtue of deferring the consumption of goods or services until their purchase price was in hand has been supplanted by a "buynow-pay-later" consumer credit system, highly developed in the United States and spreading rapidly to other advanced countries. This credit system is founded on the assumption of continuity of income for the borrower, who can draw upon his future income, by employing credit, to purchase a complete range of goods and services. Consumers, and especially workers, are actively solicited by lenders to assume credit obligations, not only to encourage the sale of goods but also so lenders may enjoy the added profit of interest on the credit. Workers represent the largest "mass" in mass markets, and the institutional arrangement of extending credit to them facilitates their active participation as consumers. Given, then, the wherewithal to consume beyond mere subsistence levels, together with the employment of modern merchandising methods and of a consumer credit system, it is not at all surprising that contemporary workers in advanced economies conceive of themselves as consumers as well as producers in the total society. Indeed, it is probable that the consumer self image of workers will come to dominate, and perhaps it already does in the United States (its emergence in the Soviet Union was already clear by the mid-1960s). With a consumer self image goes an emphasis on the possession of goods and employment of services, their continual purchase, and a willingness to use a consumer credit system to make this possible. Few goods are outside the reach of workers with money and credit (indeed, credit delinquencies usually arise from overambitious purchases), and very few services remain at the exclusive command of upper classes. The mass society gains one of its principal characteristics from the fact that it is a mass consumption society. In such a society workers constitute the major consuming segment of the populace. Workers as a social class When occupation, the traditional measure of class position, is employed, it appears that upward class mobility has not increased for workers. This is particularly true for the lifetime of the single worker, and intergenerational mobility shows little change over fairly long periods of time (Lipset & Bendix 1959). It is probable that a class system measured by occupational status is only a partial reflection of reality. Life style, with all this implies for its emphasis on consumer status, may well turn out to be
571
the more realistic measure of class position. If such a measure were applied to any considerable body of data, it is probable that both lifetime mobility and intergenerational mobility would turn out to be much higher in the contemporary world, especially among advanced nations, than in the past. The implication of this conclusion is clear: we may reasonably infer that the present class consciousness of workers derives from their new structural position in advanced societies. Workers identify themselves as consumers rather than producers. This obviously does not fit the more traditional theories of class based on the structural position of producer in the society. The consumer class-consciousness of workers is revealed in the self-designation of class position in opinion polls in the United States, where more than three-quarters of worker respondents (judging by occupation) call themselves middle class. A distinguishing feature of the middle class is its conspicuous consumption of goods and services. Collective bargaining demands in Western countries have increasingly centered on payoffs in services or spendable goods and services, rather than on conditions of work itself. Even in the Soviet Union, and in socialist economies generally, the promises (and their fulfillment) of more plentiful and higher-quality consumer goods for workers make sense as an appeal to their consumer class consciousness. Two main themes have been emphasized in sketching out the social position of industrial and commercial workers: the technological bases and sociological consequences of worker disengagement from work as a central life interest and the development of a self image of consumer rather than producer in the society, but consumer of freedom from work as well as consumer of goods and services. This is a structural position in society never before occupied by workers. There is a commonly accepted notion that industrial development requires the rise of a bourgeoisie to man technical and managerial positions. Because of its strategic position, the bourgeoisie develops a stake in the stability of industrialism itself. This must now surely be supplemented with the coordinate idea that workers play an even more important role as the major class of consumers of the plenitude that comes with industrialization, and thereby have at least as great a stake as the bourgeoisie in it. ROBERT DUBIN [See also AUTOMATION; CONSUMERS; INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS; INDUSTRIALISATION; LABOR FORCE; LABOR
572
WORKMEN'S COMPENSATION
UNIONS, article on THEORIES OF THE LABOR MOVEMENT; LEISURE; PRODUCTIVITY; WELFARE STATE.] BIBLIOGRAPHY ANDERSON, NELS 1961 Work and Leisure. New York: Free Press. ARGYRIS, CHRIS 1957 Personality and Organization: The Conflict Between System and the Individual. New York: Harper. DUBIN, ROBERT 1958 The World of Work: Industrial Society and Human Relations. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. DUBIN, ROBERT et al. 1965 Leadership and Productivity: Some Facts of Industrial Life. San Francisco: Chandler. FRIEDMANN, GEORGES (1946) 1955 Industrial Society: The Emergence of the Human Problems of Automation. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. -» First published as Problemes humains du machinisme industriel. FRIEDMANN, GEORGES; and NAVILLE, PIERRE 1961-1962 Traite de sociologie du travail. 2 vols. Paris: Colin. GALBRAITH, JOHN K. 1958 The Affluent Society. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. GIEDION, SIGFRIED 1948 Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. HAMMOND, J. L.; and HAMMOND, BARBARA (1917) 1949 The Town Labourer; 1760-1832: The New Civilisation. London: Longmans. INTERNATIONAL LABOR OFFICE, GENEVA Year-book of Labour Statistics. ~> Published since 1935/1936. See especially the 1959 volume. JACOBSON, HOWARD B.; and ROUCEK, JOSEPH S. (editors) 1959 Automation and Society. New York: Philosophical Library. KERR, CLARK et al. 1960 Industrialism and Industrial Man: The Problems of Labor and Management in Economic Growth. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. -» A second edition was published in paperback in 1964 by Oxford University Press. LIPSET, SEYMOUR M.; and BENDIX, REINHARD 1959 Social Mobility in Industrial Society. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press. MATHEWSON, STANLEY B. 1931 Restriction of Output Among Unorganized Workers. New York: Viking. MOORE, WILBERT E.; and FELDMAN, ARNOLD S. (editors) 1960 Labor Commitment and Social Change in Developing Areas. New York: Social Science Research Council. PALMER, GLADYS L. 1954 Labor Mobility in Six Cities: A Report on the Survey of Patterns and Factors in Labor Mobility; 1940-1950. New York: Social Science Research Council. ROETHLISBERGER, FRITZ J.;
and
DlCKSON,
WILLIAM
J.
(1939) 1961 Management and the Worker: An Account of a Research Program Conducted by the Western Electric Company, Hawthorne Works, Chicago. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. -» A paperback edition was published in 1964 by Wiley. SAYLES, LEONARD R. 1958 Behavior of Industrial Work Groups: Prediction and Control. New York: Wiley. SHOSTAK, ARTHUR B.; and GOMBERG, WILLIAM 1964 Blue-collar World: Studies of the American Worker. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. TILGHER, ADRIANO (1929) 1930 Work: What It Has Meant to Men Through the Ages. New York: Harcourt. -> First published as Homo faber: Storia del concetto di lavoro nella civiltd occidentale.
WALKER, CHARLES R. 1957 Toward the Automatic Factory: A Case Study of Men and Machines. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. WILENSKY, HAROLD L. 1960 Work, Careers, and Social Integration. International Social Science Journal 12: 543-560.
WORKMEN'S COMPENSATION Workmen's compensation legislation, intended to assure some recompense for occupational injuries sustained by workers, is the most prevalent form of social insurance—universal in advanced countries and widespread even among developing nations. It is generally among the first social welfare measures to be adopted. Its early acceptance has been facilitated by the fact that it usually does not create a wholly new benefit for workers but replaces existing common law or statutory rights to indemnity for injuries attributable to the employer. It is also generally associated with incentives for prevention of accidents. Moreover, individual and social costs of failure to meet the losses sustained in work injuries and fatalities are especially conspicuous. The necessity for dealing with the problem appears to appeal to a common sense of justice. European origins. Germany provided the pioneering workmen's compensation act in 1884, following rapidly upon enactment of its compulsory sickness insurance act a year earlier, although specific laws providing compensation for particular groups of workers date back to the eighteenth century. British legislation followed in 1897, but it departed widely from the German design. The different patterns adopted by these countries became the two central influences upon compensation legislation in the Western world. In retrospect, most authorities now agree that it has proved unfortunate that the British pattern was the one largely followed in the United States, mainly because it was better known there. Before the adoption of workmen's compensation legislation, an occupationally injured worker could secure redress only by suing his employer. Everywhere this was slow, costly, and usually ineffective. The legal defenses available to an employer, against whom fault had to be proved, were numerous and formidable, and awards for workers were few and meager. Both Germany, in 1871, and England, in 1880, had first experimented with employer's liability laws, which were designed to remove or abate some of the more unfair defenses. In both countries such measures were soon found unsatisfactory.
WORKMEN'S COMPENSATION The basic differences between the German and British approaches to compensation, in capsule form, were as follows. (1) The German required compulsory insurance by the employer with nonprofit public entities which were obliged to ensure that workers received the benefits due them. The entire system was under the administrative supervision of the Federal Insurance Office, and disputes were adjudicated through special courts. In England, employers were declared legally liable for industrial injuries, but insurance was not mandatory. In practice, most large employers did insure with private carriers. Claims for compensation were settled by negotiation between the worker and the employer or insurance carrier. Disputes were carried through the conventional court system. The British regarded the law as self-administering and provided no official administrative agency for supervision of the system. In Germany, protection of the worker's rights had become a state obligation; in Britain, it was still basically a private matter. (2) Litigation was minimized in Germany and was never a cost to the worker. It continued to be a prominent feature of British experience, although the worker's chances had been improved. (3) In addition to the cash compensation for wage loss, the German law originally also provided medical care benefits (connected with sickness insurance funds), and by 1925 it had added rehabilitation benefits as one part of an increasing emphasis on restoring the injured worker to employability. The British made no specific provision for medical care or rehabilitation. (4) The German system provided lifetime payments for permanent disability and for widows and children in death cases. Lump-sum settlements were permitted only for minor disabilities. The British law encouraged lump-sum settlements in cases of permanent disability, and they were mandatory in fatalities. These undesirable features of the British tradition, which was abandoned in Great Britain shortly after World War n in favor of a basically new approach, are still prominent in American legislation and practice. Development in the United States. Workmen's compensation came late in the United States, although almost three decades before any other form of social insurance. The frightful human toll of maimings and fatalities around the turn of the twentieth century, years during which industrial accidents were reaching record-breaking heights, aroused the national conscience. Industrial safety, hygiene, and compensation represented three par-
573
allel reform movements. In the United States, employer's liability legislation also preceded workmen's compensation. By 1910 practically every state had passed some sort of employer's liability statute. But here, too, these soon proved inadequate, merely mitigating the harshness and cumbersomeness of the common law. The essential basis of employer's responsibility remained tort liability. The first state acts to be based on the compensation principle of "liability without fault"—establishing employer liability for assured but limited compensation, irrespective of fault, in return for the worker's forsaking common law rights to unlimited damage suits—were enacted by Maryland in 1902, Montana in 1909, and New York in 1910. All these were held unconstitutional. But by this time public opinion was highly aroused. Under the leadership of President Theodore Roosevelt, an act covering some categories of federal employees was passed in 1908. In 32 states, 40 official commissions investigated and strongly condemned the existing legal situation and with virtual unanimity recommended adoption of laws based on "liability without fault." Despite the adverse constitutional decisions, 30 compensation laws were enacted between 1910 and 1915. But the negative constitutional rulings, particularly in regard to the New York act by the Court of Appeals in 1911, had marked effects. Although seven states amended their constitutions to make certain that compensation would be legal, most laws were narrowed and restricted because of the decisions. In 1917 the issue of constitutionality was permanently settled by the U.S. Supreme Court, which declared the state police power an adequate basis for all proposed types of compensation laws. But the earlier rulings left an enduring and heavy heritage of "elective" provisions and limited coverage of industries, occupations, and injuries, which curtailed the effectiveness of the laws. By 1920 all but six states had enacted legislation; action by Mississippi in 1948 completed the roster. Today every state operates some kind of workmen's compensation program. In addition, there are three federal jurisdictions: the District of Columbia, federal government employees, and longshoremen and harbor workers. Most states require subject employers to carry insurance with private companies or to give proof of ability to selfinsure. Eighteen states have state funds, eleven of which are "competitive" with private carriers; seven are "exclusive," although in two of these selfinsurance is also permitted. Since about 63 per cent of the business is carried by private companies and 12 per cent is ban-
574
WORKMEN'S COMPENSATION
died by self-insurance, and since the states assume widely varying degrees of supervision or involvement in the system, data on workmen's compensation experience have always been inadequate. For example, about a score of states do not have such basic data as the amount of benefits paid, by type of insurer or by type of benefit, and about 35 states have no information on number of covered workers or amount of covered payrolls. Fortunately, the Social Security Administration, which has no operational responsibilities in this field, has carefully developed techniques for obtaining reliable estimates of essential data. Coverage. Despite wide coverage, workmen's compensation has never really supplanted the common law and employer's liability legislation, especially the latter, as remedies for occupational injury. About one-fifth of United States workers are still not covered, a proportion that has remained stable over the past decade. Prominent among the omissions are interstate railway workers and merchant seamen, who feel that their experience under special federal employer's liability legislation compares favorably with that of workers under state compensation systems. Noncoverage at the state level is attributable to elective laws and exclusion of certain types of employment (e.g., small firms, agricultural work, domestic employment). State laws vary widely in these, as in other, respects. In 13, the ratio of actual to potential coverage is less than 65 per cent. In addition, some types of injuries, particularly occupational diseases (as distinguished from "accidents"), are excluded. Only two states still fail to cover any occupational diseases, but 20 more do not cover all of them. Since World War n, protection has been greatly broadened through liberal judicial interpretation of causal relationship of injury to employment and the meaning of such terms as "accidental injury." Benefits. There are three categories of compensation benefits—cash, medical, and rehabilitation— intended to indemnify the injured worker or surviving dependents for loss of wages and/or occupational capacity and for medical and hospital expenses and, where possible, to restore working capacity. Since the end of World War n, cash compensation has fairly constantly represented about two-thirds of total payments, while medical care and related costs have consumed about one-third. Cash benefits vary in accordance with four classes of injuries: temporary total disability, permanent partial disability, permanent total disability, and death. One of the basic concepts of the American systems was that benefits should be proportionally related to wage loss, as distinguished
from uniform benefit amounts paid in Britain. Most of the statutes express the intent to replace about two-thirds of the weekly wage during total disability. However, there are many qualifications in the formulas, including a weekly dollar maximum, a maximum total dollar amount, a maximum amount of time for which benefits may be paid, and a waiting period. In practice, adjustments in these statutory limitations have lagged far behind changes in wage scales, with the following conspicuous results: (1) the weekly maximum has become the effective rate for so large a proportion of beneficiaries as to approximate a flat-sum system; (2) benefit levels have fallen far below the intended objective for the majority of workers; and (3) the effective rate of compensation, as a percentage of lost earnings, is considerably lower today than it was in the early periods of the programs. Recent estimates indicate that, on the average, cash benefits do not replace more than one-third of wage loss. The proportion is highest for temporary disability cases, considerably lower for permanent disability, and lowest for death cases, where the ratio probably does not exceed 15 per cent. This does not take into account the worker's outlay for medical expenses in states which still limit such benefits, or the legal fees he may have to pay in contested cases. Despite the original intent of workmen's compensation, much the largest share of the cost of industrial injury falls on the worker and his family or on public assistance or private charity. Medical benefits are in some degree now included in all the laws and represent the most significant quantitative advance in the programs since the beginning. In part, this progress derives from recognition that effective medical care constitutes a long-term economy, for it reduces the period or intensity of disability. Nonetheless, about half the states still retain some limitations on the time, the amount of expenses, or the types of injury covered. Qualitatively, medical care progress has been less impressive. Inadequate medical administration and failure to orient medical care toward rehabilitation have been subject to growing criticism from all quarters. In less than half the states does the workmen's compensation agency have any authority to supervise medical care, despite the uniform testimony to this necessity from such sources as the American Medical Association and the American College of Surgeons. In recent years, with the rapid advance of rehabilitation techniques, the theoretical focus of workmen's compensation has been sharply shifted from
WORKMEN'S COMPENSATION concentration upon indemnity to maximum restoration of the worker to his previous condition. Despite almost universal verbal dedication of experts and administrators to the principle that rehabilitation should now be the primary goal of the compensation process, because of both its distinct economies and its humanitarianism, the programs have not responded to the new needs. Only half the workmen's compensation jurisdictions have any specific provisions in their acts to encourage rehabilitation, and these vary widely in their adequacy. Most workmen's compensation recipients who need such services do not receive them. For those who do, the delay between injury and acceptance for rehabilitation is so long as to threaten the success of the undertaking. Lack of supervision of the kind and quality of medical care has been a major obstacle. Many authorities have alleged that the basically litigious and indemnity-oriented character of workmen's compensation generates disincentives to acceptance of rehabilitation procedures. This has led to recommendations that in permanent disability cases compensation be based upon degree of physical impairment rather than on loss of earning capacity. The widespread practice of commutation of periodic benefit rights into lump-sum settlements, which removes the worker from the purview of the workmen's compensation system (and frequently otherwise defeats the program's purpose), has also retarded rehabilitation. The significance of the issue is enlarged by the fact that steady growth of other social insurance and welfare measures, which often overlap with workmen's compensation, is steadily relegating the latter to a supplementary place in financial protection. The distinctive role of workmen's compensation is increasingly in its rehabilitation potential. Little wonder that the challenge of rehabilitation is widely regarded as both the crucial opportunity and the Achilles' heel of workmen's compensation. Canadian programs, particularly in Ontario, have amply demonstrated that rehabilitation can successfully be made the core of an effective workmen's compensation system. Although the Canadian practices are widely spoken of in the United States with unstinted admiration, they have nowhere been imitated there. Costs. The aggregate annual cost of the system to employers has consistently been less than 1 per cent of payroll in covered employment since the end of World War n, moving between 0.90 per cent and 0.99 per cent in all the years from 1946 to 1962. Before the war, costs were as high as 1.2 per cent. National averages conceal great variations
575
among states, industries, and individual employers, rising from negligible proportions to 30 per cent or more of payroll in extra-hazardous industries in some states. The major issue in respect to cost has been the high proportion which fails to find its way into benefits. Overhead expenses of insurance— the major factor—and administration consume about 40 per cent of total costs, far more than in any other form of social insurance. Major issues in the United States. After more than a half century of experience, workmen's compensation in the United States is under severe and fundamental challenge as to whether it can meet its stated objectives and, more profoundly, whether the original objectives are adequate for contemporary conditions. The programs have not exhibited adaptability and dynamism commensurate with the altered environment. In part this is related to declining interest. Both absolute and relative rates of injury are decreasing; the injury severity rate (measured by lost workdays) has declined steadily; and the death rate was cut in half in the period 1938-1958. To some degree the preventive incentives of workmen's compensation may be credited with contributing to advances in industrial safety. The human toll is still distressingly large—about fifteen thousand killed annually, some eighty thousand disabled for life, and about two million temporarily disabled each year. The problem remains grim for those directly affected, but they represent a declining proportion of the population. Moreover, increasingly, the injured and the survivors of those fatally injured have other recourse, particularly in the federal Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance program, as well as the far less general provisions of private employee-benefit programs. Despite the growth of overlapping jurisdictions among public programs and the increasing complexity of distinguishing between occupational and nonoccupational disability, most American authorities agree with the conclusion of England's Beveridge Report (Great Britain 1942) that continuation of a separate program for the occupationally disabled worker is desirable. But just as England also accepted, in 1946, the necessity of the Beveridge Report's corollary recommendation for a fundamental overhauling of the compensation system, United States experts are convinced that the state programs must be revised to do a far more effective job of rehabilitating the injured worker and restoring him to employment. Unless this can be done, the case for a separate system crumbles. At the core of this challenge lies not just revised legislation, but a new approach to compensation
576
WORLD VIEW
administration, which in the United States has more nearly resembled arbitration procedure than supervisory responsibility. (Five states have no administrative agency and still rely on "court administration.") Whether this can be achieved under so many completely independent jurisdictions without any form of central coordination or assistance at the federal level is a sore question. In any case, administrators need tools. Restorative programs will require far broader coverage of injuries; adequate benefit levels, particularly to correct the inequities falling upon the permanently injured and dependent survivors; authority to deal with quality of medical care; minimization of litigation and lump-sum settlements; and more modern methods for rating permanent disability. Although the desirability of continuing a separate program for occupational injury is accepted, it is generally acknowledged that some form of reconciliation between overlapping social insurance benefits is required. The difficulties of finding a satisfactory formula in the face of the autonomous and widely varying state programs are formidable. A reformed system need not be more costly. The net costs of effective medical care and rehabilitation are very low; in fact, they often represent net savings. Moreover, improved administration, particularly in reduction of excessive expense ratios in insurance, could bring economies more than sufficient to meet any increased costs of a balanced and comprehensive system of protection. Unfortunately, while the shortcomings of the present system have been a lively subject of discussion for many years, the prospects for effective action do not appear bright. HERMAN M. SOMERS BIBLIOGRAPHY GENERAL WORKS
BERKOWITZ, MONROE 1960 Workmen's Compensation: The New Jersey Experience. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press. CHEIT, EARL F.; and GORDON, MARGARET S. (editors) 1963 Occupational Disability and Public Policy. New York: Wiley. -> Contains discussion of experiences throughout the world. GREAT BRITAIN, INTER-DEPARTMENTAL COMMITTEE ON SOCIAL INSURANCE AND ALLIED SERVICES 1942 Social Insurance and Allied Services. Papers by Command, Cmd. 6404. London: H.M. Stationery Office; New York: Macmillan. -> Known as the Beveridge Report. SKOLNIK, ALFRED M. 1962 New Benchmarks in Workmen's Compensation. Social Security Bulletin 25, no. 6:3-18. SOMERS, HERMAN M.; and SOMERS, ANNE R. 1954 Workmen's Compensation: Prevention, Insurance, and Re-
habilitation of Occupational Disability. New York: Wiley. U.S. SOCIAL SECURITY ADMINISTRATION, DIVISION OF PROGRAM RESEARCH 1967 Social Security Programs Throughout the World, 1967. Washington: Government Printing Office. SERIAL PUBLICATIONS CHAMBER OF COMMERCE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Analysis of Workmen's Compensation Laws. -» Published since 1950. Includes the Canadian provinces. INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF INDUSTRIAL ACCIDENT BOARDS AND COMMISSIONS Proceedings. -> Published since 1914 by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Standards. Provides general information on administration and policy issues. International Labour Review. -» Published since 1921 by the International Labor Office, which has also published numerous special studies. INTERNATIONAL SOCIAL SECURITY ASSOCIATION Bulletin. -» Published since 1948. Reports regularly on new developments in many nations. Social Security Bulletin. -» Published since 1938 by the Social Security Administration. Provides financial and benefit data annually, usually in the January issue. U.S. BUREAU OF LABOR STANDARDS State Workmen's Compensation Laws. -> Published since 1943.
WORLD VIEW World view is one of a number of concepts in cultural anthropology used in the holistic characterization and comparison of cultures. It deals with the sum of ideas which an individual within a group and/or that group have of the universe in and around them. It attempts to define those ideas from the point of view of the individuals holding them, from inside the culture rather than outside. It stresses the self in confrontation with the universe, although it has so far leaned very little on the personality theories of cultural anthropologists. While emphasizing the cognitive aspect of ideas, beliefs, and attitudes, a world view cannot be clearly separated from its normative and affective aspects. Thus, it tends to be confused with such concepts as ethos (relating to values), modes of thought, national character, and even culture itself. The concept of world view is closely tied to an ambitious effort made in the early 1950s by a group of scholars at the University of Chicago, guided by Robert Redfield. In Redfield's book The Folk Culture of Yucatan (1941), he expressed an embryonic concern with the concept of world view. Redfield's encounter with an Indian culture which was at grips successively with Spanish and modern urban cultures aroused his interest in the evolutionary process and in sociocultural change. He was impressed by the incurable wound inflicted on the Indian past
WORLD VIEW and, throughout his career, thought of primitive culture as a broken thing, persisting here and there and striving to defend itself. This view caused Redfield to stress the positive aspects of the primitive condition and to see any evolution therefrom —in spite of reconstructive attempts—as essentially disruptive and negative. In approaching modern urban culture via the peasant culture which is its rural counterpart, Redfield sought to rediscover the purity of folk culture and, indeed, to reimpose it by a concern with the good life and by an interest in the cause of peace and understanding among nations. In its final metamorphosis, influenced by the theories of orientalists, the concept of world view merged with the concept of "Great" and "Little" traditions, which contains a more balanced evolutionary view of the loss of purity. Redfield's original concern with levels of understanding among individuals who hold diverse world views developed into the study of interactions between high and low, intellectual and lay, urban and village cultures within a great civilization. Theoretical development In a seminal paper, "World View and Social Relations in Guatemala," Sol Tax (1941) distinguished world view from social relations, although he suggested that perception of the latter enters into the "mental apprehension of reality" that is world view. Tax observed that Guatemalan Indians, who do not acculturate to Ladinos or to each other, continue to have a primitive world view, although they appear to have had a "civilized" type of impersonal, market-oriented system of socioeconomic relations since pre-Columbian times. The first explicit elaboration of the concept occurred in Redfield's article "The Primitive World View" (1952). Here he clearly emphasized the individual: self is the axis of world view, which is the way a man in a particular society sees himself in relation to everything around him. Redfield was primarily interested in world views that characterize whole peoples and have been generally developed without the assistance of the specialized philosopher; he distinguished these from a "cosmology," or the systematic reflections of the specialized thinker. He hypothesized that there are certain universal elements of world views. Every world view distinguishes (a) part of the self from another part, thus establishing, as it were, a dialogue within the self; (Z?) a human nature from that which is nonhuman; (c) classes and categories of the human, i.e., social persons (e.g., groupings of persons who are intimate and similar, others who are far
577
and different); and (d) an entity called nature and another described in shorthand as God, within the nonhuman. Further, every world view includes (e) an orientation of the self in time and space by means of major natural phenomena; and (f) a similar orientation to life crises in human existence. From these exploratory hypotheses, Redfield proceeded to question the nature of the confrontation and the attitude that man takes toward the confronted. Considering particular world views of various ancient and primitive peoples, he pointed out that these views vary greatly with respect to their central concerns; for example, some center on man, some on God or nature, while others confront man, nature, and God about equally. Further, world views seem to vary in regard to the attitude of man toward his relationship with the confronted; that is, they differ in the relative emphasis on cognitive and affective components (note the intrusion of values), the conception of the degree of order and the type of structure to be found in the universe, and the conception of man's duty in relation to the confronted. Redfield emphasized the last mentioned possibility: "World view can be seen as a characteristic attitude of purpose or obligation toward that which is confronted, whether that be human nature, or God-Nature, . . . whether the Not-Man is conceived as two things, Nature and God, or whether one of these two prevails over the other, or is involved with the other" (1952, p. 33). Three main attitudes were identified: the nonhuman may be maintained, obeyed, or acted upon. In his 1952 paper Redfield characterized the primitive world view as one in which (a) the confrenter and the confronted tend to be unitary; ( b } the predominant attitude toward the nonhuman is one of maintenance of the relationship; (c) the universe is thought to "care," to be morally significant. Redfield continued to write about world view in three monographs (1953; 1955; 1956). Although he made no very significant additions to the concept in these works, certain shifts can be noted. The conflict between Redfield's psychocultural attitude toward world view and his sociological conscience can be observed in The Primitive World and Its Transformations (1953), in which he struggled with Childe's concept of the urban revolution and with the unfortunate tendency of the "technological order" to take primacy over the "moral order" —an offspring of world view and ethos-type concepts—in explanations of the rise of cities. This conflict arose most sharply in regard to the ques-
578
WORLD VIEW
tion of levels of understanding among the holders of world views, raised principally in The Little Community (1955) and Peasant Society and Culture (1956). In these works, world view, which in Redfield's 1952 paper had been presented as an unsophisticated aspect of cosmology, became virtually the outside observer's construction of a native's total view, while cosmology seemed to be merely the insider's total construction, although at the highest or most esoteric level. On this point, apparently, Redfield did not face clearly the full implications of the observer's effect on the observed and of the possible effect of a primitive world view on the observer's scientific world view. Furthermore, since the concept of world view was never clearly tied to social roles and social interaction, Redfield never completely made the conceptual transition from world view to the Great and Little traditions. Thus, in 1956 Redfield's view of the relation between elite and peasant cultures continued to present the elite culture as a more highly developed form of the peasant culture. Redfield believed that this presentation would provide the basis for the study of intercommunications between peasant culture carriers (Little Tradition) and elite carriers (Great Tradition). The study of levels, however, shifted rapidly out of the field of social relations and into cultural history, in that it became the study of the evolution of leisure classes within folk societies, primitive rebellions against these classes, and eventual reintegration. Moreover, a flood of new data from Asian countries (e.g., studies of Indian villages) complicated the problem ad infinitum. The problem of definition became acute; for example, the following sets of terms have become virtually interchangeable: Great and Little world views; elite and folk traditions; high, classic, or learned elite cultures and low, popular, or debased peasant cultures. Redfield's death in 1958 occurred before he could develop his ideas further. Calixta Guiteras-Holmes, one of Redfield's research workers, produced one of the finest and most complete accounts of Mesoamerican ideology to date. Although her book (1961) contributes valuable data on world view, it raises methodological problems in their acutest form. Following the method preferred by Redfield, she gave a thorough account of one individual's world view. However, much of her initial description of the culture of the Tzotzil Indians gives a hearsay impression, thus overlapping with her account of world view, and insufficient attention seems to be paid to the difference between what informants do and what they claim they do. The work gives only minimal atten-
tion to sociological factors and does not move forward theoretically from Ruth Bunzel's earlier work, Chichicastenango: A Guatemalan Village (1952). Charles Leslie's work on the Zapotec Indians of Mitla (1960), while far less thorough than Guiteras-Holmes' study, was more ambitious in that it used data from more than one informant and attempted to link the whole community's world view with its economic, kinship, and politico-religious institutions and with its experience of social change. Eschewing what he considered to be inadequate data on self and body images and peripheral concerns about the natural world, Leslie noted that Mitlenos seem mainly concerned "with comprehending and regulating their social relationships and with questions about the reality, efficacy and moral significance of supernatural beings" (1960, p. viii). In his discussions on the ritual of price, the social control of conflict, active versus decaying myth, and the function of laughter in controlling witchcraft, for example, Leslie related his world view material to levels of awareness in the life of the self and of society and to the wider field of anthropological theory. If his book is more a work of art than a work of science, this is no doubt because of the ultimate implications of a concept like world view. In his first, unpublished work on world view, E. M. Mendelson attempted to render the concept operational by using Durkheimian and Levi-Straussian theory. Utilizing Durkheim and Mauss's Primitive Classification (1903), he suggested that religion be returned to a prominent place in world view studies, insofar as it would seem fairly consistently to be itself characterized by a methodological approach to phenomena and insofar as the primitive seems to proceed not so much from the notion that the total world can be known in phenomenological terms now or eventually but rather from the notion that this knowledge is unattainable and that it is therefore necessary to ascribe names and functions to phenomena so that the world as a whole can be socially manageable. Taking initiation as the revealer of "the true names of things" as defined by society, he suggested that the question of levels of awareness could be approached through the study of initiation institutions in various societies. His three-level ordering of data includes : (1) Cognitive systems at the level of the scientific world view (a) Natural (biology, chemistry, physics) (b) Social (psychology, sociology, communications, history, cosmology)
WORMS, RENE (c) Parasocial (theology, comparative religion) (2) Attitude systems at the level of any world view (mineral, animal, vegetal, human, paranatural) (3) Action systems at the level of direct behavioral observation (medicine, agriculture, technologies, ritual, etc.) He also raised the question of philosophy as part of world view and/or as the framer and judge of world view. In his work on Santiago Atitlan, Mendelson concentrated on religion, took data from several informants, and paid close attention to the effect of the observer on the observed (1956; 1958). He studied the areas of agreement and disagreement to be found when two religions (Indian and Roman Catholic) meet and suggested ideal types of three possible sub world views: the Roman Catholic archetype, the Indian archetype, and a world view consisting of elements from both religions. Outside Redfield's circle, little use has been made of the concept of world view. It appears in the work of J. S. Slotkin and in Clyde Kluckhohn's contribution to the theory of social action, where it is, however, subordinated to social values (1951, p. 410). Clifford Geertz has observed that world view, as the cognitive, existential aspects of a given culture, combining with ethos and values (the moral and aesthetic aspects), underpins religion "to give to a set of social values what they perhaps need most to be coercive: an appearance of objectivity" (1957, p. 426). The implications of his work are important for the study of symbolic systems and ethics. In short, world view was one tool for the better understanding of other peoples and for the creative tasks imposed upon anthropologists by the shift away from ethnocentrism. Redfield's formulation of the concept may in time come to be seen primarily as an instance of haute vulgarisation, an attempt to interpret one aspect of anthropology to cultural historians. This evaluation leaves Redfield's dignity and brilliance unimpaired. E. M. MENDELSON [See also the biography of REDFIELD.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
BUNZEL, RUTH 1952 Chichicastenango: A Guatemalan Village. Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press. DURKHEIM, EMILE; and MAUSS, MARCEL (1903) 1963 Primitive Classification. Translated and edited with an introduction by Rodney Needham. Univ. of Chicago Press. -> First published as "De quelques formes primitives de classification" in Volume 6 of Annee sociologique.
579
GEERTZ, CLIFFORD 1957 Ethos, World-view and the Analysis of Sacred Symbols. Antioch Review 17:421437. GUITERAS-HOLMES, CALiXTA 1961 Perils of the Soul: The World View of a Tzotzil Indian. New York: Free Press. HORTON, ROBIN 1960 A Definition of Religion and Its Uses. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 90, no. 2:201-226. KLUCKHOHN, CLYDE 1951 Values and Value-orientations in the Theory of Action: An Exploration in Definition and Classification. Pages 388-433 in Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils (editors), Toward a General Theory of Action. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. LESLIE, CHARLES M. 1960 Now We Are Civilized: A Study of the World View of the Zapotec Indians of Mitla, Oaxaca. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne Univ. Press. MENDELSON, E. M. 1956 World-view. Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of Chicago. MENDELSON, E. M. 1958 The King, the Traitor, and the Cross: An Interpretation of a Highland Maya Religious Conflict. Diogenes 21:1-10. MENDELSON, E. M. 1959 Maximon: An Iconographical Introduction. Man 59:57-60. MENDELSON, E. M. 1965 Los escandalos de Maximon. Seminario de Integracion Social, Publication No. 19. Guatemala City: Ministerio de Educacion. REDFIELD, ROBERT 1941 The Folk Culture of Yucatan. Univ. of Chicago Press. REDFIELD, ROBERT 1952 The Primitive World View. American Philosophical Society, Proceedings 96:30-36. REDFIELD, ROBERT 1953 The Primitive World and Its Transformations. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press. -» A paperback edition was published in 1957. REDFIELD, ROBERT 1955 The Little Community: Viewpoints for the Study of a Human Whole. Univ. of Chicago Press. -> A paperback edition, bound together with Peasant Society and Culture, was published in 1961 by Cambridge University Press. REDFIELD, ROBERT 1956 Peasant Society and Culture: An Anthropological Approach to Civilization. Univ. of Chicago Press. -> A paperback edition, bound together with The Little Community, was published in 1961 by Cambridge University Press. TAX, SOL 1941 World View and Social Relations in Guatemala. American Anthropologist New Series 43: 27-42.
WORMS, RENE Rene Worms (1869-1926), French sociologist, was the son of the political economist Emile Worms. He studied at the Ecole Normale Superieure, and after completing his agregation in philosophy, he acquired doctorates of law, of letters, and of science, as well as the rank of agrege of economic science. Although a contemporary of the highly influential Durkheim, Worms remained largely independent of the Durkheimians in his organizational activities and teaching career, in his sociological thought, and as a man of action. In 1893 (two years before the Durkheimian Annee sociologique first appeared) Worms founded
580
WORMS, RENE
both the Revue Internationale de sociologie and the Institut International de Sociologie. Like Durkheim, Worms was a gifted organizer of sociological activities, but since he made no attempt to dominate a cohesive and obedient "school," he was able to appeal to mature men of various orientations, such as Espinas, Giddings, Gumplowicz, Marshall, Menger, de Roberty, Simmel, Tarde, Tonnies, Veblen, and Westermarck. The Revue and the Annales of the institute contain many writings by these and other non-Durkheimian social scientists, French as well as foreign. (Emigres from Russia and central Europe were particularly well represented.) The Bibliotheque Sociologique Internationale, also founded by Worms in 1893, eventually published over fifty books by the above scholars and others. Many of these attended the meetings of the Societe de Sociologie de Paris, founded by Worms in 1895. While Worms's teaching career began at the secondary-school level, in philosophy, he simultaneously served as Bergson's substitute at the College de France. After 1907, he taught a course on the history of sociology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Sociales and concurrently a cours libre in the University of Paris law faculty. He also taught rural economics in the law faculty of the University of Caen and a course on the philosophy of commerce at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales in Paris. In addition to his academic activities, Worms served for over twenty years in the Acadernie d'Agriculture de France and on the Conseil d'Etat. His experience in these governmental advisory organizations is reflected in his discussions of the relationship between "social art" and "social science": social art (today called social action) suggests problems for scientific investigation; social science in turn develops a body of theoretical concepts which can guide subsequent social art. Worms is frequently considered a member of the organismic school of sociology. This interpretation is based largely on an early work, Organisme et societe (1896b), in which he developed the analogy between the biological organism and society along lines similar to those followed by Comte, Spencer, and Espinas, but carried the analogy perhaps even further than they did: since societies operate according to general principles similar to those of biological organisms, it follows that sociology as a science can learn much from biology. Thus, it is possible to develop an anatomy of societies, grouping and classifying the elements of the social body into social cells, layers, organs, and tissues, and a physiology of societies, analyzing
the performance of the functions of nutrition, reproduction, and so on. The utility of the organismic analogy was strongly questioned by Durkheim and Tarde, among others, and Worms, who was especially sensitive to the criticisms of Tarde, thereupon reformulated his position when he prepared his major three-volume treatise, Philosophic des sciences sociales (19031907). In contrast to the highly systematic Organisme et societe, the Philosophic is a markedly eclectic work. The organismic analogy is briefly sketched at the outset and virtually abandoned later. Worms's limited-range statements in this work have stood the test of time relatively well; his eclecticism permitted him to escape many of the false dichotomies that plagued Durkheim and Tarde. To argue that social facts are characterized by imitation (as Tarde did) or by exteriority and constraint (as Durkheim did) is to twist social reality to fit a general theory, Worms asserted. Social facts are both external and internal; they may or may not involve imitation; they may be perceived as constraints or they may be fully accepted. General external characteristics of social facts are multiplicity, complexity, diversity in space, and variation in time; general internal characteristics are mentality, causality, and regularity—for mentalities, causes, and regularities are not purely social but are also characteristic of individuals. Social change, according to Worms, does not derive exclusively from either individual innovations (as Tarde believed) or collective actions (as Durkheim held). Worms's eclectic theoretical perspective was reflected in his views on the compatibility of the social sciences: he maintained that the three disciplines of psychology, social psychology, and sociology are all legitimate and that there is no necessity for conflict between them—a view that is decidedly more balanced than that of either Tarde or Durkheim. Worms's statement of the relationship between theory, methods, and empirical data is somewhat like that of Robert K. Merton. "Partial syntheses" and "more general syntheses" were essential preliminaries to "general laws," he felt. He analyzed both causal relationships and what are today termed functional relationships. He presented relatively extensive and, for the period, advanced discussions on the use of statistics, monographs (case studies), surveys, experiments, and historical and ethnographic methods in developing sociological theories. Worms criticized the one-factor deterministic theories current in his time, emphasizing that social change can originate either in the realm of ideas
WUNDT, WILHELM or in that of social structure. Correspondingly, economic, kinship, religious, political, and legal institutions all possess some degree of autonomy, and all influence one another to a certain degree. In a series of chapters on these various institutions, Worms reviewed outstanding theories and empirical findings dealing with each of them and attempted to establish a series of generalizations in each area. For example, in his treatment of the evolution of value systems, he combined Tarde's quantitative analysis of change in the frequency of different types of crimes with Durkheim's theories about individual infractions against the collective conscience. Discussing science, he built upon the classifications of Comte and Manouvrier but suggested that instead of one continuum it would be more useful to establish three general groupings: natural, biological, and social 'sciences. Worms clearly understood that science is a social institution, for it is collective, international, disinterested, and continuous. Although Worms's impact on subsequent French sociologists was relatively modest, he contributed intellectual and institutional support for sociological development outside the realm of the more dogmatic Durkheimian, psychologistic, and Le Playist "schools." A cluster of social scientists who remained independent of the schools, including G. Richard, D. Essertier, and other lesser-known writers, found in Worms and his Revue a tolerance and support for the most heterogeneous ideas. These independent writers provided an informed critical audience for the work of the more dogmatic social scientists, helping them to keep a more balanced perspective on their own work. In addition, through the development of a tradition of eclectic work, a synthesis of the contributions from the several schools began to emerge in French sociology in the late 1930s, which has developed still further since 1945. TERRY N. CLARK [For the historical context of Worms's work, see SOCIOLOGY, article on THE EARLY HISTORY OF SOCIAL RESEARCH; and the biographies of DURKHEIM; LE PLAY; TARDE.] WORKS BY WORMS 189la De la volonte unilaterale consideree comme source d'obligations en droit romain et en droit francais. Paris: Giard & Briere. 1891b Elements de philosophic scientifique et de philosophic morale. Paris: Hachette. 1891c Precis de philosophic, d'apres les Legons de philosophic de M. E. Rabier. Paris: Hachette. 1892 La morale de Spinoza. Paris; Hachette.
5 81
1896a De natura et methodo sociologiae. Paris: Giard & Briere. 1896b Organisme et societe. Paris: Giard & Briere. (1903-1907) 1913-1920 Philosophic des sciences sociales. 3 vols. Paris: Giard & Briere. -» Volume 1: Objet des sciences sociales. Volume 2: Methode des sciences sociales. Volume 3: Conclusions des sciences sociales. Volume 3 contains a list of Worms's articles and brochures published before 1907. 1906 Etudes d'economie et de legislation rurales. Paris: Giard & Briere. 1910 Les principes biologiques de devolution sociale. Paris: Giard & Briere. 1912 La sexualite dans les naissances franfaises. Paris: Giard & Briere. 1914 Les associations agricoles. Paris: Giard & Briere. 1917 Natalite et regime successoral. Paris: Payot. 1921 La socioiogie: Sa nature, son contenu, ses attaches. Paris: Giard & Briere. -> A concise summary of Worms's three-volume Philosophic des sciences sociales. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
BLOCK, ADOLPHE 1926 Note sur M. Rene Worms. Societe d'Anthropologie de Paris, Bulletins et memoires 7th Series 7:7 only. CASE, CLARENCE M.; and WOERNER, FRED 1929 Rene Worms: An Appreciation. Sociology and Social Research 13:403-425. CLARK, TERRY N. 1965 Empirical Social Research in France: 1850-1914. Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia Univ. ESSERTIER, DANIEL 1930 Rene Worms. Pages 232-244 in Daniel Essertier, La sociologie. Paris: Alcan. INSTITUT INTERNATIONAL DE SOCIOLOGIE Annales. -> Worms was a frequent contributor from 1893 to 1924. OUY, ACHILLE 1925 Rene Worms. Revue Internationale de sociologie 33:577-580. Revue Internationale de sociologie. -* Almost every volume from 1893 to 1924 contains items by Worms. RICHARD, GASTON 1927 Allocution. Institut International de Sociologie, Annales 15:55-70.
WORSHIP See RELIGION; RELIGIOUS OBSERVANCE; RITUAL.
WRITING See URBAN REVOLUTION.
WUNDT, WILHELM Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) played such a major role in the emergence of the new scientific psychology as a discipline separate from philosophy and physiology that he has been called the "founder," or the "father," of experimental psychology. This new science was deeply rooted in philosophy—in the tradition of Aristotle, Descartes, and the British empiricists (from Locke to Hume to John Stuart Mill). In addition, the philosopher Hermann
582
WUNDT, WILHELM
Lotze in the 1850s contributed a book on the physiology of the soul and acted as mentor to Franz Brentano, Carl Stumpf, and G. E. Miiller, who were later to become three of the great men of psychology. The roots in physiology were not so deep, although Hermann von Helmholtz, after astonishing scientists in 1850 by measuring the speed of the nervous impulse, had turned in the next two decades to the study of the psychophysiology of visual and auditory sensation. Helmholtz could have become the "founder" of the new psychology had his interests spread far enough beyond these topics, but he was destined instead to become a great physicist. There was also G. T. Fechner, once a physicist, who in 1860 published his classical text on psychophysics, a book that established psychology as a quantitative science, but Fechner's ultimate goal was philosophical—to win the battle against materialism—and psychophysics was for him only a means of showing how science can establish the relationship between body and mind. Wundt was a true entrepreneur. He would never have succeeded without the relevant philosophical tradition and the recent discoveries in nerve physiology, nor without the contributions of his contemporaries—Lotze, Fechner, and Helmholtz. But the new psychology needed an eponym, and Wundt supplied not only a name but also all the supports that a new science needs for recognition—a basic philosophy, a program, a systematic handbook to demonstrate its nature, a laboratory and the research that issues from it, and a journal for the publication of the new findings. All this was provided by Wundt between 1862 and 1883. He built on this base with more research and texts well into the present century, while other new laboratories and journals and books, especially in Germany and America, multiplied not only by virtue of Wundt's immediate influence but also because Wundt was the timely agent of what was to be the next development in the approaching scientific age. Wundt was born in Neckarau, a suburb of Mannheim, in Baden, Germany, on August 16, 1832. He was christened Wilhelm Max, but he never used his middle name in any publication, and few psychologists have ever heard of it. His father was a Lutheran pastor. Wundt led the life of an only child, for he was still very young when a brother and sister died and an older brother left home for school. When he was six, his father moved to a new pastorate at Heidensheim, also in Baden, and for two years Wundt attended the local school. After that, his education was taken over by his father's vicar, who shared a room with Wundt and became for the boy an object of such great admira-
tion and affection that when the vicar moved to a neighboring village, Wundt's parents allowed their son to live with his teacher and so to continue his education. Wundt seems to have had few friends at this time; he was a serious boy who did not know how to play and spent his time in useful tasks about the house while awaiting the vicar's return from his parish duties. At 13 Wundt was sent for a year to the Gymnasium at Bruchsal and then to the Gymnasium at Heidelberg, where he made friends and developed habits of intensive reading that were to last him all his life and ultimately to gain him his vast erudition. When he was 19 his parents sent him to the university at Tubingen. His father died while he was at the university, and Wundt, faced with the need to earn a living, chose to study physiology, thus deferring a final choice between science and medicine. In order to pursue this plan he returned to Heidelberg. Wundt took four years to obtain his doctorate in medicine. During the first year he studied science —physics, chemistry, anatomy, and physiology— which he liked. The second year he received practical training in the art of medicine, instruction that had the paradoxical effect of increasing his interest in physiology, especially the research of Johannes Miiller at Berlin and of Carl Ludwig at Leipzig. Wundt's first publication—a paper on the chemistry of urine (1853)—came out at this time. In his third year he was made an assistant in a medical clinic and published a paper on the effect on respiration of the cutting of the vagus nerve (1855). In his fourth year he studied in Berlin for a semester and was enormously stimulated by the intellectual atmosphere there. Back at Heidelberg in 1856 he received his medical degree and in the next year was habilitated as Dozent in physiology, a post that he held for seven years. Wundt spent 17 years at Heidelberg. During his tenure as Privatdozent he became the assistant who, under a new law, was to give laboratory instruction in physiology to all would-be physicians— a tedious task that Wundt relinquished as soon as he could. In 1864 he was promoted to ausserordentlicher Professor. He was compulsively productive. His reading led him to a systematic reorganization of his material and often to creative thinking, and that in turn compelled him to clarify his thought in new lectures that emerged shortly in a new book or, as he grew older, in a revision of one of his old books. In 1858 Wundt published a book on muscular movement and the first of the six sections of his Beitrage zur Theorie der Sinneswahrnehmung
WUNDT, WILHELM (1858-1862), an important little volume that he finally completed in 1862. In alternate years he lectured on the natural history of man, which he called Volkerpsychologie, and on the nature of the natural sciences, with an eye to establishing "physiological psychology" among the natural sciences. All the while he was collecting facts of human, animal, individual, and social psychology and instances of how psychological factors influence human thought and action; these were published in 1862 as 57 lectures (in two volumes) of Vorlesungen iiber Menschen- und Thierseele (1864-1865; an English translation, Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology, appeared in 1907). When he revised these lectures thirty years later, he called them the intellectual "wild oats" of his youth. In any event, he was still playing the role of physiologist, and in 1864 he published a textbook of physiology (revised twice in the next ten years) and three years later a handbook of medical physics. Gradually, however, he turned toward philosophy and the new science of psychology. His Beitrdge had mentioned an experimental psychology that lay between philosophy and physiology, and Wundt, physiologist as he still was, chose "physiological psychology" as the best name for it. In 1867 his lectures began to center upon this new science, and ultimately Wundt's conception of it emerged in his great systematic contribution, Grundzuge der physiologischen Psychologic (1873-1874), a single volume of 870 pages when it appeared in 1874 and eventually three volumes totaling 2,317 pages in the sixth and final edition dated 1908-1911. This was the new psychology that Wundt had ushered into being, and the six editions were in effect the history of experimental psychology's first forty years. From 1858 to 1871, Helmholtz, who was 11 years Wundt's senior, had occupied the chair of physiology at Heidelberg. The relationship between these two men was cordial but not close. Helmholtz was concerned with his own research on vision and hearing and with the publication of his great classics in these two fields. Wundt was teaching, writing, and clarifying his ideas. Fechner was then in Leipzig, although not at the university, but Wundt benefited more from Fechner's psychophysics than from Helmholtz' psychophysiology. Although Wundt was an ausserordentlicher Professor, when Helmholtz went to Berlin in 1871, Wundt was passed over. The first half of the Grundzuge der physiologischen Psychologie came out in 1873 and the whole of it in 1874, while Wundt was still at Heidelberg, but shortly thereafter he accepted a call to Zurich to teach "inductive philosophy," a term
583
that may have been a philosopher's euphemism for experimental psychology. That arrangement, however, lasted only a year, for then Wundt was called to Leipzig, where the university had split the chair of philosophy in order to accommodate Wundt and his new ideas. Thus, for the next 35 years, from 1875 to 1910, Leipzig was the center for the new science, to which young Germans and Americans, and a few French and Russians, flocked to learn how philosophy could measure the mind and describe the activities of consciousness by the experimental method of introspection. The laboratory. When he arrived in Leipzig in 1875, Wundt was given an old, unused auditorium as a place where he could arrange experimental demonstrations for the students of his seminar and perhaps conduct some experiments of his own. Was this the world's first psychological laboratory? Wundt himself said that the date of his "founding" of the Psychologische Institut at Leipzig was 1879, a date familiar to every student of the history of psychology, but at the time the founding was quite unnoticed. It was years later that Wundt, looking back on the history of psychological research at Leipzig, saw that the first experiment by a member of his seminar—research that was ultimately published—was begun in 1879 and that research by other students followed immediately. Only then did Wundt choose 1879 as the date of the founding, and it is only fair to accept his choice. What was founded then was the de facto institute; the de jure founding did not come until 1894, when the institute was already in full swing and had published the results of some forty experimental researches. In 1879, with the laboratory beginning to produce a steady stream of publishable papers, an outlet for these papers had to be found. Until that time the physiological journals had been accessible to physiological psychology, but the new stream had considerable volume, and the indomitable Wundt wanted control of the journals that were to present the new psychology and eventually to supply material for his continually updated Physiologische Psychologie, the second edition of which appeared in 1880. Wundt therefore founded his own journal, calling it Philosophische Studien. The first number appeared in 1881 and the first volume in 1883. It may be surprising that Wundt used the term philosophische in the title, but he was, after all, a professor of philosophy and had come to believe that the new psychology must remain the handmaid of philosophy. He deplored the brash Americans who struggled to free psychology from philosophy. In the first five volumes of his Studien, about one paper in five was philosophical—about
584
WUNDT, WILHELM
Leibniz or Locke or Kant, and quite often written by Wundt himself—whereas the remaining fourfifths dealt with the business of the new psychology—the results of experiments, discussions of methods and theory, and criticism of results and views. Philosophy and culture history. The world knows Wundt as a psychologist because it was in this field that he won his fame, but he also thought of himself as a philosopher and, later, as a historian of culture, a special kind of social psychologist. He was an extremely busy man. From 1880 until his death in 1920 he was writing his Logik (18801883), expanding it into three volumes and revising it in four editions. It contained almost fifteen hundred pages and included some discussion of the psychology of thinking. From 1886 to 1912 he authored four editions of Ethik, the later volumes of which were well over five hundred pages each. From 1889 to 1919 there were also four editions of his System der Philosophic, a compendious work, equal in size to the Ethik, that made good his promise in the Introduction to the Beitrage (18581862) to deal with the problem of the metaphysics of psychology. All the while the laboratory continued to produce PH.D.'S and papers. But Wundt was also writing in a quite different field, for he had promised himself and the world to deal with the natural history of man and did so in the ten volumes of his Volkerpsychologie (1900-1909; five of the volumes were already being expanded and revised while the others were still being written). The work contained systematic discussions of language, myth, religion, art, society, law, culture, and history. It is by studying the history of human culture, Wundt insisted, that one can achieve an understanding of the nature of thinking, a mental activity which cannot be examined by introspection in the laboratory. The Physiologische Psychologic has no chapter on thought, and in a way Wundt was right. When his junior associate, Oswald Kiilpe, tried to study thought in the laboratory by introspection, he failed (it became clear after Sigmund Freud's conceptual innovations had been accepted that the method of introspection could not deal with the factor of the unconscious). Wundt faced the problem of the group mind, preferring to call it the Volksseele, a less objective term than the more commonly used Volksgeist. It seems odd that all this systematized erudition has had so little effect upon the subsequent history of social psychology, but this field was less ready to accept the weight of Wundt's scholarship than was the mainstream of psychology, which ever since Descartes and Locke had been getting itself ready for Wundt.
Productivity. It has been noted that from 1853 to his death in 1920 Wundt averaged, per annum, seven excursions into print of 110 pages each and that altogether in this period he wrote or revised 53,735 pages, an achievement which averages nearly one word every two minutes, day and night. By 1920 Wundt had rounded out the program that he had vaguely anticipated in 1862. He had established experimental psychology as an independent science in the world of learning. He had published the first systematic and encyclopedic handbook for the new science and had kept it up to date through six editions in the course of forty years. He had founded the first laboratory for experimental research in psychology and had proved that it could continue to be productive. He had begun a journal of theoretical and experimental psychology and had maintained it for twenty years. He had published and revised a logic, an ethics, and a scientific metaphysics, all three written as a psychologist would write them. He had completed his systematic exposition of the nature of the human mind by producing ten volumes on the natural history of man, that portion of psychology that lay, as he thought, beyond the reach of the experimental laboratory. All this made up a complete life. In 1920 he wrote a book of his professional reminiscences, and on August 31 of that year he died. Experimentalism. Wundt himself prescribed the topics of the experimental research done in his laboratory. There were two principal fields of investigation : (1) sensation and perception, studies which made use of Fechner's psychophysical methods and eventually involved each of the five senses; and (2) the measurement of reaction times, with the use of what was called "the subtractive procedure." For example, a quick muscular reaction was thought to require attention but not apperception, whereas a slower sensorial reaction would seem to require apperception as well as attention. Subtracting one from the other, the Wundtians arrived at 0.1 second as the time needed for apperception, and in similar fashion they figured the times required for cognition, association, discrimination, and choice. The method, which created great excitement at the end of the nineteenth century, was, however, discredited in the twentieth. There were also experiments on the range of attention and on the duration of a single act of attention and other experiments that tended to support the new tridimensional theory of feeling that Wundt proposed in 1896, the theory that feeling is described in respect to three parameters: pleasantness-unpleasantness, strain-relaxation, and excitement-calm. Of course, the laboratory did not attack the supposedly impossible problem of thought, and it
WUNDT, WILHELM failed to find the means for measuring learning and memory, a contribution of Hermann Ebbinghaus in 1885. Wundt never became involved in this new work. Psychology. Wundt held that psychology deals with experience that is immediate, whereas physics treats the same experience as mediated by certain rules of inference. An example of optical illusion shows the difference •. a stick in water appears, according to introspection, to be bent, although according to inferences from certain laws of physics, it is straight. Introspection is the immediate observation of subjective experience without inferential adjustments. Introspection reveals mental elements, which are sensations possessing specific qualities and intensities, and shows how they are compounded into more complex perceptions and ideas. Wundt was a convinced elementarist and a sensationist, and this pattern which he imposed on the new experimental psychology formed an orthodoxy against which other schools reacted, notably act psychology and, later, gestalt psychology in Germany and behaviorism in America. This kind of dissent is generally a source of progress. In Wundt's scheme perceptual wholes are compounded by fusion, as with tones that make a chord; by assimilation, as with lines that set up an optical illusion; or by complication, like a sweet and sour taste, a fruity odor, a yellow appearance, and the tinkle of ice that together make up the perception of lemonade. Besides the sensations, there are the elements of feeling: at first only pleasantness and unpleasantness, but later the multiplicity of feelings that the tridimensional theory introduced into Wundt's system. Apperception, an event at a higher level than attention, makes the compounds of sensations and feelings secure. Images are centrally excited sensations and not a new class of elements. The elements in Wundt's system are called mental processes because they are thought to be in flux, never fixed. This conception did much to meet the objections of the critics of this mental chemistry of Wundt's, but it was difficult to understand. Can introspection bring to science descriptions of specific compounds whose very elements are in perpetual change? Nevertheless, Wundt spoke appropriately for his time and supported his views with strong arguments. Psychology has continued to change, but the basic character of modern psychology was established by Wundt. EDWIN G. BORING [For the historical context of Wundt's work, see the biographies of FECHNER; HELMHOLTZ; LOTZE; MULLER, JOHANNES; for discussion of the subsequent
585
development of Wundt's ideas, see ATTENTION; HEARING; PSYCHOLOGY, article on PHYSIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY; PSYCHOPHYSICS; SENSES; VISION; and
the biographies of EBBINGHAUS and TITCHENER.] WORKS BY WUNDT Uber den Kochsalzgehalt des Harns. Journal fur praktische Chemie 59:354-359. 1855 Versuche liber den Einfluss der Durchschneidung der Lungenmagennerven auf die Respirationsorgane. Archiv fur Anatomic, Psychologic und wissenschaftliche Medicin [1855]-.269-313. 1858 Die Lehre von der Muskelbewegung. Brunswick: Vie we g. 1858-1862 Beitrdge zur Theorie der Sinneswahrnehmung. Leipzig: Winter. -> Issued in parts. (1864-1865) 1907 Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology. New York: Macmillan. -» First published in German. (1873-1874) 1908-1911 Grundziige der physiologischen Psychologic. 6th ed., rev. 3 vols. Leipzig: Engelmann. -» The physiological part of Volume 1 was translated into English as Principles of Physiological Psychology and published in 1905 by Macmillan. (1880-1883) 1919-1921 Logik. 4th ed. 3 vols. Stuttgart: Enke. -» Volume 1: Allgemeine Logik und Erkenntnisslehre. Volume 2: Logik der exakten Wissenschaften. Volume 3: Logik der Geisteswissenschaften. (1886) 1897-1901 Ethics: An Investigation of the Facts and Laws of the Moral Life. 3 vols. New York: Macmillan. -> First published in German. Volume 1: Introduction: The Facts of the Moral Life. Volume 2: Ethical Systems. Volume 3: The Principles of Morality and the Departments of the Moral Life. A fourth German edition was published in 1912 by Enke. (1889) 1919 System der Philosophic. 4th ed. 2 vols. Leipzig: Kroner. (1896) 1907 Outlines of Psychology. Rev. ed. Leipzig: Engelmann. -> Translated from the seventh revised German edition. (1900-1909) 1911-1929 Volkerpsychologie: Eine Untersuchung der Entwicklungsgesetze von Sprache, Mythus und Sitte. 10 vols. Leipzig: Engelmann. 1920 Erlebtes und Erkanntes. Stuttgart: Kroner. 1853
SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
BEN-DAVID, JOSEPH; and COLLINS, RANDALL 1966 Social Factors in the Origins of a New Science: The Case of Psychology. American Sociological Review 31:451-465. BORING, EDWIN G. (1929) 1950 A History of Experimental Psychology. 2d ed. New York: Appleton. -» See especially pages 316-347, "Wilhelm Wundt." BORING, EDWIN G. 1965 On the Subjectivity of Important Historical Dates: Leipzig, 1879. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 1:5—9. EISLER, RUDOLF 1902 W. Wundts Philosophic und Psychologic in ihren Grundlehren. Leipzig: Earth. HALL, G. STANLEY 1912 Founders of Modern Psychology. New York: Appleton. -> See especially pages 309458, "Wilhelm Wundt." HERRNSTEIN, RICHARD J.; and BORING, EDWIN G. 1965 A Source Book in the History of Psychology. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. -> See especially pages 399-406 and 595-596. HOFFDING, HARALD (1905) 1915 Modern Philosophers. London: Macmillan. -> First published in German. See especially pages 3-37, "Wilhelm Wundt."
586
WUNDT, WILHELM
In Memory of Wilhelm Wundt. 1921 Psychological Review 28:153-188. KONIG, EDMUND 1901 W. Wundt: Seine Philosophic und Psychologie. Stuttgart: Frommann. MURPHY, GARDNER (1929) 1949 Historical Introduction to Modern Psychology. Rev. ed. New York: Harcourt. -> See especially pages 149-173, "Wundt and Experimental Psychology." PASSKONIG, OSWALD 1912 Die Psychologie Wilhelm Wundts: Zusammenfassende Darstellung der Individual-, Tier- und Volkerpsychologie. Leipzig: Siegismund & Volkening. RIBOT, THEODULE (1879) 1886 German Psychology of To-day: The Empirical School. New York: Scribners. -» First published in French. See especially pages 188249, "Wundt: Physiological Psychology." Ross, DOROTHY 1967 On the Origins of Psychology. American Sociological Review 32:466-469. -» A discussion of Ben-David and Collins 1966. See also pages 469-472
for a "Reply to Ross," by Joseph Ben-David and Randall Collins. TITCHENER, E. B. 1921 Wilhelm Wundt. American Journal of Psychology 32:161-178, 575-580. -> Pages 575580 contain a review of Wundt's Erlebtes und Erkanntes 1920. TITCHENER, E. B. et al. 1908-1922 A Bibliography of the Scientific Writings of Wilhelm Wundt. American Journal of Psychology 19:541-556; 20:570; 21:603604; 22:586-587; 23:532; 24:586; 25:599; 33:260262. WATSON, ROBERT I. 1963 The Great Psychologists: From Aristotle to Freud. Philadelphia and New York: Lippincott. -» See especially pages 241-251, "Wundt: Introspection and Experiment." WUNDT, ELEANORE 1927 Wilhelm Wundts Werk: Ein Verzeichnis seiner sdmtlichen Schriften. Munich: Beck. -> A bibliography containing over 500 items, prepared by Wundt's daughter.
YERKES, ROBERT M. Robert Mearns Yerkes (1876-1956) described himself as a "psychobiologist," a term he used to pinpoint the scientific disciplines that guided his work. His contributions to his self-named field were outstanding; in retrospect, however, his contributions to the development of psychology as a profession, rather than to the science as such, appear to have been even more far-reaching. Yerkes was born on a prosperous farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. He enjoyed observing flowers and birds; he kept as pets both wild and domestic animals. As he grew older, he became progressively disenchanted with working on the farm, considering it a challenge to perform the irksome farm tasks with the minimum effort possible and with the simplest procedure. Farming interfered with his major interest—obtaining an education; he recalled staying home from school to help on the farm and keeping up with his classmates by studying late at night. He always carried a pocket dictionary and studied it during free minutes in the fields or barn, thus mastering vocabulary, spelling, and pronunciation. The positive influences in his early years were his mother, whom he described as sweet of disposition, wise, and unusually able; a capable young German hired man, possessed of good sense and understanding; and his maternal grandfather, who encouraged his intellectual interests. His father was an industrious worker but unlike his son intellectually; he instilled fear, and later strong resentment and dislike, as did Yerkes' paternal grandfather. The negative feelings Yerkes harbored toward them doubtless strengthened his de-
termination to avoid farming and to succeed against odds in achieving an education. Yerkes made his first career choice, medicine, when he was ill with scarlet fever at the age of seven, and he planned a medical career until the early part of his graduate studies. The choice was encouraged by a kindly cousin, the family doctor, who took him to Philadelphia to visit hospitals and physicians at work. After seven years in a country school and one year in normal school in West Chester, Pennsylvania, he would have "read" medicine with his cousin and entered Jefferson Medical College had not a physician uncle in Collegeville offered him a chance to earn his way through Ursinus College. Yerkes eagerly accepted, spending one year at the academy and four years at the college, where the biologist—physician P. C. Mensch aroused his interest in research. After graduation he entered Harvard as a provisional undergraduate, and at the end of a year there he received an A.B. degree. He then faced the decision of entering either medical school or graduate school. The offer of an assistantship and scholarship led him to choose graduate school. He studied zoology for one year and psychology for two, receiving his doctorate in psychology in 1902 and then remaining as instructor and professor at Harvard until 1917. The transfer from zoology, where he worked with such brilliant men as Edward L. Mark, George H. Parker, Charles B. Davenport, and William E. Castle, to psychology was not a drastic shift, for he was primarily interested in animal psychology. This was generally a golden period for Harvard in the division of philosophy, ethics, and psychology, and Yerkes profited from the presence of Josiah Royce, George H. Palmer, William James, Hugo
587
588
YERKES, ROBERT M.
Miinsterberg, Francis Peabody, George Santayana, Dickinson Miller, William McDougall, Edwin B. Holt, and Ralph Barton Perry. Early in his career, in 1905, he married Ada Watterson. He wrote of his marriage as a partnership "which perfectly blended our lives and incalculably increased our professional and social usefulness" (1932, p. 391). He and his wife collaborated on various papers and on the book The Great Apes (1929). While still a graduate student, Yerkes conceived the idea of an institute of comparative psychobiology and soon thereafter went to Germany and Switzerland to learn about the organization and equipment of psychological and physiological institutes. For almost three decades he clung tenaciously to his idea and worked hard to promote it, finally bringing it to fruition in 1930, when the Yale (later Yerkes) Laboratories of Primate Biology at Orange Park, Florida, were opened. In the intervening years Yerkes engaged in a wide variety of projects. He published papers on subjects ranging from jellyfish to apes, from sensation to ideation. His first book was The Dancing Mouse (1907), a comprehensive series of investigations of this distinct breed. He wrote an Introduction to Psychology (1911) at the same time he was teaching summer and extension courses and classes at Radcliffe to supplement his salary. He worked with Edward Thorndike at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and collaborated with John Watson on methods for the comparative study of vision in animals (1911) [see THORNDIKE; WATSON]. He studied neurosurgery with Harvey Gushing at Johns Hopkins University. With Gilbert V. Hamilton he developed the multiple-choice method of testing. During a sabbatical leave in 1914-1915, he worked with monkeys and an orangutan in Hamilton's Montecito laboratory, and this experience intensified his desire for a primate laboratory; in 1916 he published a plan for one, under the title "Provision for the Study of Monkeys and Apes," but no one volunteered financial support. From 1912 to 1917 he worked half-time as a psychologist at Boston Psychopathic Hospital, became interested in comparative research in psychopathology and in tests and measurements as an aid to psychiatry, and developed with James W. Bridges and Rose S. Hardwick a point scale for measuring mental ability (1915). This last achievement probably had more influence on psychology during the next decades than any other of his projects, for it was the starting point for the development of the Army Alpha.
The year 1917 was an important one for Yerkes. He resigned from his professorship at Harvard and from his hospital post to accept the chairmanship of the department of psychology at the University of Minnesota. He had become disenchanted with Harvard and was excited by the opportunity to develop both the department and the psychology laboratory at Minnesota. The war intervening before he occupied the chair, he directed the department in absentia for two years, during which he effected many changes. Soon after the outbreak of war in 1917, Yerkes became a major in the Army Medical Department. He and a group of colleagues who believed that psychology could be useful to the war effort had established relations with that department and within 18 months developed the Army Alpha, promoted it against overwhelming odds, and had it accepted. Once they had overcome military and civilian resistance to the test, they trained officers and enlisted men in its administration and tested more than 1.7 million soldiers in 35 army camps. The program ended abruptly with the armistice, but the test had proved its usefulness, assuring psychology a fixed place in the military establishment. Moreover, the results constituted the largest intelligence test sample to that date and provided further impetus to the development of group tests. After the war Yerkes resigned his Minnesota post and accepted an appointment with the National Research Council in Washington, D.C., seeing this move as the best method both for publishing the results of the army testing program and for finding support for a primate institute. He was unable to realize the latter aim, but he did publish the war materials (1919; 1920; 1921). He firmly established the place of psychology in the National Research Council and the National Academy of Sciences, and he promoted and facilitated grants for research on sex and human migration. Yerkes bought his first chimpanzees in 1923, housing them in his Washington home. With Blanche Learned, he published the results of his observations in Chimpanzee Intelligence and Its Vocal Expressions (1925). In 1924 he left the National Research Council to become a professor at the new Institute of Psychology at Yale: James R. Angell, the president of Yale, promised Yerkes that he could devote himself to comparative psychobiology and seek aid for an ape research center. He was, indeed, finally able to obtain such aid. With Carnegie funds, he spent the summer of 1924 studying a private primate colony in Cuba. The following year he received a Rockefeller grant
YULE, G. UDNY for a pilot laboratory in New Haven and for several chimpanzees; he hoped thereby to demonstrate the feasibility of a larger laboratory in a warm climate. In three successive winters he also studied a gorilla in Florida and published his findings in three monographs (1927; 1928). In 1930 his dream at last materialized: financed by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Yale Laboratories of Primate Biology, stocked with chimpanzees, opened. Yerkes directed the laboratories until his retirement in 1941 and then went back to New Haven to continue teaching until 1944. During his Yale years, his laboratories published 214 papers, and he produced his two greatest books, The Great Apes (1929) and Chimpanzees (1943). During World War n he was chairman of the Survey and Planning Committee of the National Research Council's Emergency Committee in Psychology. One outcome of the committee's work was the amalgamation of psychological organizations into an enlarged American Psychological Association; many years earlier, in 1917, Yerkes had served that association as president. In his last years he renewed his interest in the gorilla and promoted research on it at the San Diego Zoo; he also wrote his still unpublished "Testament," an autobiographical manuscript. The last of the ten items in the "personal creed" at the end of his "Testament" fittingly characterizes Yerkes: it is his belief in "the priority of life over death, effort over prayer, knowledge over faith, and resolution over wishfulness." HARRY F. HARLOW [For discussion of the subsequent development of Yerkes' ideas, see INTELLIGENCE AND INTELLIGENCE TESTING; PSYCHOLOGY, article OU COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY; SEXUAL BEHAVIOR, article on ANIMAL SEXUAL BEHAVIOR; SOCIAL BEHAVIOR, ANIMAL.] WORKS BY YERKES
1907
The Dancing Mouse: A Study in Animal Behavior. New York: Macmillan. 1911 Introduction to Psychology. New York: Holt. 1911 YERKES, ROBERT M.; and WATSON, JOHN B. Methods of Studying Vision in Animals. Behavior Monographs 1, no. 2. (1915) 1923 YERKES, ROBERT M.; and FOSTER, JOSEPHINE A Point Scale for Measuring Mental Ability. Rev. ed. Baltimore: Warwick & York. -» Yerkes, J. W. Bridges, and R. W. Hardwick wrote first edition. 1916 Provision for the Study of Monkeys and Apes. Science 43:231-234. 1919 Report of the Psychology Committee of the National Research Council. Psychological Review 26:83-149. 1920 YOAKUM, CLARENCE S.; and YERKES, ROBERT M. Army Mental Tests. New York: Holt. 1921 YERKES, ROBERT M. (editor) Psychological Examin-
589
ing in the United States Army. Volume 15 of National Academy of Sciences, Memoirs. Washington: Government Printing Office. 1925 YERKES, ROBERT M.; and LEARNED, BLANCHE W. Chimpanzee Intelligence and Its Vocal Expressions. Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins. 1927 The Mind of a Gorilla. Parts 1, 2. Genetic Psychology Monographs 2:1-193, 375-551. 1928 The Mind of a Gorilla. Part 3. Comparative Psychology Monographs 5, no. 2:1-94. (1929) 1945 YERKES, ROBERT M.; and YERKES, ADA W. The Great Apes. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. 1932 Robert Mearns Yerkes: Psychobiologist. Volume 2, pages 381-407 in A History of Psychology in Autobiography. Worcester, Mass.: Clark Univ. Press. 1943 Chimpanzees: A Laboratory Colony. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press; Oxford Univ. Press. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
BORING, EDWIN G. 1956 Robert Mearns Yerkes: 18761956. Pages 133-140 in American Philosophical Society, Yearbook. Philadelphia: The Society. CARMICHAEL, LEONARD 1957 Robert Mearns Yerkes. Psychological Review 64:1-7. ELLIOTT, R. M. 1956 Robert Mearns Yerkes: 18761956. American Journal of Psychology 69:487-494.
YOUTH See ADOLESCENCE; AGE DIFFERENTIATION; DELINQUENCY; DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY; LABOR FORCE, article on PARTICIPATION; LIFE CYCLE.
YULE, G. UDNY George Udny Yule (1871-1951), British statistician, was the only child of Sir George Udny Yule, an Indian civil servant, and the nephew of Sir Henry Yule, a distinguished Orientalist and traveler. He was educated at Winchester and at University College, London, where he graduated in engineering in 1892. Feeling that engineering was not his metier, he tried experimental physics and spent a year at Bonn in research under Hertz on electric waves in dielectrics. Yule's first four published papers, in fact, dealt with this subject. But physics also failed to hold his interest. In his mature work there is little evidence of his background, except at the end of his life, when the philological gifts of his family became manifest in his studies of literary vocabulary. When Yule returned to London in 1893, Karl Pearson was beginning to form his famous statistical unit at University College. Having known Yule as a student and divined something of his talents, Pearson offered him a demonstratorship (a kind of junior lectureship), which Yule promptly accepted. He held this post for six years, but the salary was scarcely a living wage, and in 1899 he resigned to
590
YULE, G. UDNY
earn his bread and butter as secretary to an examining body in London. His separation from University College, however, was more formal than real: in particular he gave, from 1902 to 1909, a series of lectures that formed the basis of his Introduction to the Theory of Statistics (1911). This rapidly diffused his reputation throughout the scientific world; 50 years later, after two revisions by M. G. Kendall, it was still a standard text. In 1912 the University of Cambridge decided to create a lectureship in statistics. Yule was offered the lectureship and accepted it. Apart from the interruption of World War I (during which he acted as director of requirements at the Ministry of Food), he spent the rest of his life at St. John's College, Cambridge. He was promoted from lecturer to reader (the equivalent of the American assistant professor) and continued as reader until his retirement in 1930. At that point he was physically fit enough to learn to fly, but shortly afterward he was grounded and, indeed, virtually confined to college by a partial heart block. After some years of relative inactivity he took a new lease on life, producing in 1944 his Statistical Study of Literary Vocabulary; but his health continued to decline, and he died of heart failure in 1951. Honors came to him in a steady stream. He received the gold medal of the Royal Statistical Society in 1911, was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1922, and was president of the Royal Statistical Society from 1926 to 1928. He was also elected to various foreign societies, and his Introduction to the Theory of Statistics was translated into several languages. Yule's contributions to the development of theoretical statistics were extensive and profound. They may be classified into four main groups, corresponding roughly in time to his period in London (1893-1912), the war interval (1913-1919), his heyday at Cambridge (1920-1931), and his final studies (1938-1946). When Yule joined Pearson in 1893, the science of statistics as it became known in the middle of the twentieth century scarcely existed. Pearson was beginning his series of memoirs on frequency curves and on correlation. The practical applications of this work lay mainly in biology, and he made occasional forays into social medicine. Yule was an ideal complement. He took the theory of correlation, then in a rather elementary state, and in two basic memoirs (1897 and 1907) laid the foundations of the theory of partial correlation and of linear regression for any number of variables [see MULTIVARIATE ANALYSIS, articles on CORRELA-
TION]. Yule's method almost immediately became standard practice. Characteristically, Yule's theoretical studies of regression were accompanied by practical studies, notably on the relationship between pauperism and outrelief (i.e., relief given outside institutions by local authorities). From problems of relationships among measurable variables Yule was led to the parallel problems among attributes—i.e., those qualities that form the basis of classification on a nonmeasured basis, such as sex, inoculation against disease, or eye color. This in turn led him to revive Boole's logic of class frequencies (1901) and to develop a theory of association, culminating in a fundamental paper (1912). The work was illustrated by studies of smallpox and vaccination. These interests led to the formation of a lifelong friendship with the epidemiologist Major Greenwood. Their joint work on the interpretation of inoculation statistics (1915), now almost a textbook commonplace, was a landmark in medical statistics. Yule's second period, 1913-1919, short as it was, produced two basic papers in collaboration with Greenwood. In the first (1917), Yule produced a theoretical scheme to account for the socalled negative binomial distribution, for which fresh applications were still being discovered nearly 50 years later. In the second (1920), the authors discussed compound distributions, with particular reference to industrial accidents. In the light of later elaborations these early attempts seem simple. But the simplicity is that of genius, and if it is the first step that counts, Yule must be credited with a great many first steps. The 1917 paper contains the beginnings of what in later hands became an important class of stochastic processes. The third period saw the full exercise of Yule's abilities. Some earlier studies in Mendelian inheritance emerged in a mathematical theory of evolution (1924), which attracted no attention from geneticists but introduced some J-shaped frequency distributions that later proved of great interest in other subjects. Likewise, his interests in vital statistics, a subject on which he lectured for many years, culminated in a paper (1925) on the growth of population and the factors that control it. His greatest work, however, undoubtedly lay in his papers on time series (1926; 1927). In his earlier work on correlation Yule had been puzzled by the high correlations that were noted between unrelated quantities observed over a course of time. For example, suicide rate was highly correlated with membership in the Church of England, and more recently, in the same category, there has been observed in Sweden a remarkable correlation
YULE, G. UDNY between the fall in birth rate and the decline in the population of storks. Yule called these "nonsensecorrelations" and successfully set out to explain them. Incidentally, in so doing, he frightened economic statisticians off correlation analysis for two or three decades. He then proceeded to discuss time series in terms of their internal correlations, devising the correlogram for the purpose. In his papers on sunspots, he effectively laid the basis of what is known as the theory of "autoregressive" time series [see TIME SERIES]. In later hands this has developed into a large and complicated subject, but no one has ever surpassed Yule's peculiar blend of insight, theoretical analysis, and insistence on practical application. His illness over the years 1931-1938 prevented the publication of any serious research. Toward the end of that period, however, he became interested in the statistical characteristics of prose style, with particular reference to questions of disputed authorship. His earlier work concerned sentence length, but he later turned to noun frequency. The master had not lost his touch: once more his work formed the basis of extensive further research by others, and his technique was applied in such an unrelated field as bacteriology. But he himself had finished and, as his health steadily failed, set himself to wait for the end, which came in his 81st year. Yule's outstanding contribution to statistics results not so much from any one quality as from his combination of qualities. He was not a great mathematician, but his mathematics was always equal to the task. He was not trained in economics or sociology, but his wide knowledge of human relationships enabled him to write with insight on both subjects. He had the precision, the persistence, and the patience of a true scientist but never lost sight of the humanities. He was a kindly, genial, highly literate, approachable man who refused to embroil himself in the controversies that mar so much of statistical literature. Above all, he had the flair for handling numerical data that characterizes the truly great statistician. M. G. KENDALL [For the historical context of Yule's work, see the biography of PEARSON. See also LINEAR HYPOTHESES, article on REGRESSION; STATISTICS, DESCRIPTIVE, article On ASSOCIATION.
591
WORKS BY YULE
There is no collected edition of Yule's works. A complete bibliography is given in Kendall 1952. 1897
On the Significance of Bravais' Formulae for Regression, &c., in the Case of Skew Correlation. Royal Society of London, Proceedings 60:477-489. 1901 On the Theory of Consistence of Logical Class-frequencies, and Its Geometrical Representation. Royal Society of London, Philosophical Transactions Series A 197:91-133. 1907 On the Theory of Correlation for Any Number of Variables, Treated by a New System of Notation. Royal Society of London, Proceedings Series A 79: 182-193. (1911) 1958 An Introduction to the Theory of Statistics. 14th ed., rev. & enl. London: Charles Griffin. -» M. G. Kendall has been a joint author since the eleventh edition, 1937. The two most recent editions were revised by Kendall. 1912 On the Methods of Measuring Association Between Two Attributes. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 75:579-652. -»• Contains ten pages of discussion. 1915 GREENWOOD, MAJOR; and YULE, G. UDNY The Statistics of Anti-typhoid and Anti-cholera Inoculations, and the Interpretation of Such Statistics in General. Royal Society of Medicine, Section of Epidemiology and State Medicine, Proceedings 8, part 2:113-194. 1917 GREENWOOD, MAJOR; and YULE, G. UDNY On the Statistical Study of Some Bacteriological Methods Used in Water Analysis. Journal of Hygiene 16:36-54. 1920 GREENWOOD, MAJOR; and YULE, G. UDNY An Inquiry Into the Nature of Frequency Distributions Representative of Multiple Happenings With Particular Reference to the Occurrence of Multiple Attacks of Disease or of Repeated Accidents. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 83:255-279. 1924 A Mathematical Theory of Evolution, Based on the Conclusions of Dr. J. C. Willis, F. R. S. Royal Society of London, Philosophical Transactions Series B 213: 21-87. 1925 The Growth of Population and the Factors Which Control It. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 88:1-58. 1926 Why Do We Sometimes Get Nonsense-correlations Between Time-series?—A Study in Sampling and the Nature of Time-series. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 89:1-64. 1927 On a Method of Investigating Periodicities in Disturbed Series, With Special Reference to Wolfer's Sunspot Numbers. Royal Society of London, Philosophical Transactions Series A 226:267-298. 1944 The Statistical Study of Literary Vocabulary. Cambridge Univ. Press. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
KENDALL, M. G. 1952 G. Udny Yule 1871-1951. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 115:156-161. -» Contains a complete bibliography. YATES, F. 1952 George Udny Yule 1871-1951. Volume 8, pages 309-323 in Royal Society of London, Obituary Notices of Fellows. Cambridge: The Society. -> Contains a bibliography on pages 320-323.
ZIONISM Zionism may be summarily defined as the Jewish nationalist movement whose endeavors to solve the "Jewish problem" led to the establishment of the "Jewish state" of Israel. The aims of Zionism were those of many nationalist liberation movements: to revive a national language (Hebrew or Yiddish) and culture; to repossess and develop the resources of the national territory; and to achieve sovereignty for a national state. But the nation to be liberated lived in exile from its ancestral home, with its members scattered all over the globe. Accordingly, Zionist objectives also included removing Jews from the countries of their dispersion and colonizing them in Zion, the ancient homeland. Upon the successful execution of its program, Zionism anticipated that anti-Semitism, rooted according to Zionist theory in Jewish homelessness, would disappear. The Jews remaining in the Diaspora would be reduced to a number susceptible of assimilation (Herzl [1894-1904] 1955, pp. 241242). Another theory held that a free Jewish community in Zion, not dominated by the milieu of the Gentile majority, would unfold the full potentialities of the Jewish historic individuality. It would produce a national cultural revival and advanced social institutions of universal significance, whose influence would enable Diaspora Jewries to sustain their collective existence even under modern conditions of equal citizenship and acculturation tending to dissolve their identity. Thus, like other national liberation movements, Zionism developed a rationale that was Utopian, or even messianic, in tone. But its strategic situa-
tion also dictated a tactical approach of pragmatic reasonableness. Palestine in the nineteenth century was neither controlled nor in any large measure occupied by Jews. Zionism could not hope to negotiate its aims unless it defined them in a way compatible with the interests of the suzerain power, Turkey, and other powers concerned with the Eastern Question. Hence, at the first Zionist Congress in Basle, 1897, Theodor Herzl, 1860-1904, obtained a resolution demanding not a "Jewish state" but an "oeffentlichrechtlich gesicherte Heimstaette"; a term subsequently translated in the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, by the vague expression "national home." The Zionist position in the Jewish community was equally weak. Unlike other nationalist liberation movements, which could appeal to massive and powerful popular resentments focused on a single, concrete foreign oppressor so that all ideological opposition was often swept out of the field, Zionism was only one of many rival Jewish ideologies (Halpern 1961, pp. 22-23). Moreover, it was divided by a wide diversity of internal factions. The objectives it could agree on had to be compromises, capable of uniting rival Zionist parties on a common denominator and attracting essential support from the non-Zionists in the Jewish community. Hence, the broad formulas of the 1897 program and of the statute of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, formed in 1929. History The idea that the Jewish position in the Gentile world presented a problem to be rationally solved, one of the basic Zionist principles, first became
593
594
ZIONISM
current in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. A Jewish movement to achieve this solution, beginning in western Europe in the late eighteenth century, produced campaigns for enlightenment and general humane culture among Jews; for their civic emancipation; and eventually for religious reform, discarding many traditional practices and beliefs. In Russia, the pogroms and repressive laws of the 1880s thoroughly disillusioned some Jewish intellectuals who until then had favored reforms similar to those advocated by their western European counterparts. They turned in revulsion and humiliation against the Western principle of accommodating to a general humanism and insisted that the Jews themselves, and not benevolent Gentiles, must actively and militantly solve their own problem—and solve it by returning to their own sources. These new "Lovers of Zion" (Hovevei-Zion) dedicated themselves not to the aim of emancipation but to the counterposed aim of "auto-emancipation," a slogan provided by the title of an 1882 brochure written by Leo Pinsker, 1821-1891, a physician who in 1884 became the chosen leader of the movement. In spite of ideological opposition, the HoveveiZion were compelled to cooperate with Western Jews. Since the 1840s the emancipated and enlightened Western Jewish community—including many who no longer believed in redemption in Zion —had introduced rational objectives and methods into the traditional support extended by the Diaspora to pious Jews in Palestine. At first, outstanding individuals like the British Sir Moses Montefiore, 1784-1885, and, since 1860, a major French-led organization, the Alliance Israelite Universelle, had sought to obtain political and legal security for the Jewish settlement, to provide vocational training and secular culture, and to place Jews on farmholdings, instead of maintaining a community in Palestine almost exclusively devoted to prayer, study, and penance (Sokolow 1919, vol. 1, pp. 115-120, 176-183). Dr. Pinsker, like Theodor Herzl after him, found it natural to appeal to such Jewish benefactors for support in their projected work in Palestine, even though it was conceived in a different spirit. The Hovevei-Zion, based on a poor membership and not permitted to work freely under Russian law, were rebuffed in their attempt to obtain political concessions from the Sublime Porte for colonization and checked in their spontaneous immigration to Palestine by legal and administrative obstacles swiftly set up against European Jews by the Turks. They were driven back on slow, more or less surreptitious methods of colonization and had to rely for political and financial
support on Western philanthropists, notably Baron Edmond de Rothschild, 1845-1934. The consequence was the emergence of a faction in the movement, led by the writer Ahad Ha'am, 18561927, which severely criticized Rothschild paternalism and, above all, the settlers' dependency in all those spheres—economic, cultural, communal— where the Zionist ideal had hoped to build a nucleus of national independence in Palestine. The positive doctrine of this group centered on the desire of disillusioned eastern European intellectuals to recapture traditional attitudes and cultural motifs that Western modernists had abandoned. Against the Reform thesis that the Jewish dispersion was a divine mission, not a penance, they declared that the exile of the Jews was a fact. Against the liberal notion of civic emancipation as the Messianic redemption of the Jews, they reasserted the restoration to Zion as the solution of the Jewish problem. As a result the young Zionist intellectuals were welcomed back into the fold by many traditionalists—and the new Zionist movement was constituted as much by the latter as by the former. The seeds of difference were inherent in this union. Traditionalist Jews who became HoveveiZion soon began to demand that the prodigal sons make their return complete by submitting fully to the yoke of tradition. The new Zionists, although penitents, rather like the Russian Slavophile radicals who were their contemporaries, were not ready to abandon modernistic and rational standards because of their rebellion against Western values. They saw their Jewish situation not as a divinely decreed election and a penance to be borne but as a social historical problem that urgently required a rational solution. They became lovers of Zion, of the Hebrew language, and of the tradition but wished to free all of these values from the dead hand of sacramentalism. In consequence, the Hovevei-Zion movement in Russia developed traditionalist and modernist factions. The former reemerged, at a later date, as a distinct party called the Mizrachi in the World Zionist Organization created by Theodor Herzl. The modernist school worked toward the ends of a "cultural Zionism," seeking a secular revival of the Hebrew language and culture and of an active national will and consensus. While cultural Zionism did not continue as an organized faction after the Hovevei-Zion were absorbed by the World Zionist Organization, it was a pervasive influence thereafter in the movement, especially in the "practical Zionist" faction. Theodor Herzl entered the Zionist movement as a sharp critic of colonization in Palestine, as conducted by Baron de Rothschild and the Hovevei-
ZIONISM Zion together. He developed in his 1896 booklet Der Judenstaat, and in his conduct of the World Zionist Organization from 1897 to his death in 1904, the doctrine of "political Zionism." As conceived by him, and his successors and supporters Max Nordau, 1849-1923, and David Wolffsohn, 1856-1914, and, in a later generation, the self-styled "Herzlian" Zionists led by Vladimir Jabotinsky, 1880-1940, the Zionist strategy must concentrate on achieving adequate political conditions for its nationalist aim before beginning other subsidiary activities, such as colonization. An opposing faction, generally called the "practical Zionists" and led after World War i by Chaim Weizmann, 1874-1952, insisted that other nationalist aims, such as the cultural revival and continuing resettlement in Palestine, must be pursued simultaneously with the Zionist diplomatic campaign. Indeed, achievement of the nationalist political goals, they felt, would be most effectively advanced by building up the Jewish settlement in Palestine and thus adding the rights of occupation to the rights of historic connection and present Diaspora needs to bolster the Zionist claim. Until the death of Herzl in 1904, the views of political Zionism prevailed. Herzl also maintained an entente with the religious Zionists, restricting at the congress sessions discussion of projects to revive a secular Hebraic culture because of their objection. The failure of Herzl's diplomatic campaign for a charter to resettle Zion frustrated the movement; and his one major success—the British proposals in 1903 to resettle Jews not in Palestine or its environs but in east Africa—split it. After the definitive rejection of this proposal, some Zionists, led by Israel Zangwill, 1864-1926, left the organization to form their own Jewish Territorialist Organization. Within the Zionist organization the practical Zionists grew increasingly strong, until they took over the leadership fully in 1911. The new policy that was initiated strengthened the tendency, already marked since 1908, to pursue the colonization of Palestine under existing political conditions, setting aside the quest for a charter (Boehm 1935-1937). It also introduced new stress on the nationalist cultural revival. As a side effect, some religious Zionists left the congress and joined with earlier anti-Zionists in Orthodox Jewry to form a new ultra-Orthodox world organization, Agudat Israel. The Mizrachi who remained Zionists developed a set of minimum demands, requiring respect for tradition in general Zionist facilities and support for autonomous religious cultural activities by Mizrachi paralleling any general cultural activity. Granted this, they proposed to fight for acceptance
595
of Jewish tradition in Orthodox interpretation as binding on all Zionists and, ultimately, as constitutional in the Jewish state. At the outbreak of World War i, any uniform policy of an international organization divided between the warring nations became virtually impossible. Leading Zionists in the German headquarters of the organization and in England pursued Zionist diplomacy independently in a form consonant with the war aims of their respective countries. Major responsibility was vested in new Zionist leaders residing in neutral countries, notably Louis D. Brandeis, 1856-1941. Toward the end of the war the practical Zionist Chaim Weizmann, aided by Nahum Sokolow, 1859-1936, secured from Britain the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, and parallel statements from Britain's allies (Stein 1961). This declaration of sympathy for Zionist aspirations, with its pledge to facilitate the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine, was embodied in the San Remo agreement of April 26, 1920, assigning Palestine as a mandate territory to Britain, and also in the mandate instrument approved by the Council of the League of Nations on July 24, 1922. The Balfour Declaration and the mandate represented in form the charter which Herzl's diplomacy had sought in vain, but in practice it did not make possible the orderly, relatively rapid mass transfer of Jews to Palestine that Herzl had envisaged. Consequently, Herzlian Zionists like Max Nordau and Vladimir Jabotinsky regarded the mandate instrument as inadequate for Zionist purposes and called for political action to obtain more precise commitments toward the ultimate creation of a Jewish state. Nordau demanded in 1920 the immediate transfer to Palestine of enough Jewish immigrants to form a Jewish majority. A diametrically opposed view was pressed in 1920 by Justice Brandeis. He regarded the diplomatic phase of Zionist history as closed with the San Remo treaty. The world Zionist organization should resolve itself into a federation of philanthropic societies, each with autonomy in its own country, and a central executive agency devoted chiefly to practical colonization. The latter body should be made up not of political leaders but of technicians and administrators, not necessarily committed to the whole Zionist doctrine but ready to work under the conditions laid down in the mandate for developing the Jewish national home. Chaim Weizmann, who succeeded in winning control of the movement, followed a line which, in the Zionist congress of 1907, he had defined as "synthetic" (Weizmann 1949, p. 157). He accepted the
596
ZIONISM
existing legal framework of the mandate and pursued practical work under its terms. However, far from allowing the political functions of the world Zionist organization to lapse, he developed and tightened them in the running battle with the mandatary over the precise meaning of the mandate instrument. The co-option of experts and enlistment of supporters from among non-Zionist Jews, suggested by Brandeis, was carried out by Weizmann through the Jewish Agency for Palestine, formed in 1929 in agreement with such men as Louis Marshall, 1856-1929, and Felix Warburg, 1871-1937. Weizmann's immigration and colonization policy was one of gradualism not merely because Winston Churchill in a 1922 white paper had imposed upon Jewish labor immigration into Palestine the limit of "economic absorptive capacity" but also because such an approach was in accord with his own beliefs, as a disciple of the prudent Ahad Ha'am. After an initial period of opposition, the labor Zionist factions became Weizmann's reliable and consistent allies in this strategy and finally the dominant force in the coalition. They concentrated on what they regarded as the primary, critical task both of Zionist and Jewish socialist strategy: to create in Zion a Jewish farmer-worker class and thus eliminate the fundamental cause of the dependency of the Jewish people in the Diaspora—their lopsided, "unproductive" occupational distribution. Although firmly united by a strong workers' federation with unusually wide powers and functions, labor Zionist factions differed on numerous issues and were organized and acted independently. Most prominent politically were the three major federations of collective settlements or kibbutzim ("communes"), which had the greatest immediate influence on labor immigrants. They differed not only in their plans of village organization but also in their attitudes toward the second and third socialist internationals, the proper Zionist policies vis-a-vis the Arabs, and the definition of the ultimate Zionist aim. The question of the final political status of Palestine became increasingly acute. Arab riots of increasing violence and magnitude broke out in 1920, 1921, and 1929, culminating in the outright revolt of 1936-1939. Owing also to mounting pressure from the emerging Rome—Berlin Axis, Britain sought to gain Arab support, or at least mitigate Arab hostility, by an increasingly anti-Zionist interpretation of its obligations as mandatary. A White Paper in 1939 proposed to freeze the Jewish community at the one-third proportion of the Palestine population which it had virtually reached; and in
the following year land regulations banned or rigorously restricted Jewish land purchase in all but a tiny part of Palestine. At this time Nazi oppression had made the Jewish refugee problem unbearably acute and the omens of the deliberate extermination of European Jewry were becoming manifest. The pressure to redefine Zionist policy became overwhelming. Some left wing and pacifist Zionists favored a binational Arab-Jewish state, with a provisional limit of 40 per cent of Jews in the population and additional immigration to be permitted by majority decision. Jabotinsky's Revisionist group wanted a militant Zionist policy demanding a Jewish majority in the whole mandate territory, including Transjordan, which had been excluded from the Jewish national home area by Churchill's 1922 White Paper. The Irgun Zvai Leumi and the "Stern group" arose as more or less autonomous Revisionist paramilitary formations, and the latter, even during the war against the Axis, demanded an immediate Jewish uprising against the British. NonZionists associated with the Jewish Agency proposed to restore the original criterion of economic absorptive capacity as the sole principle governing Jewish immigration. The dominant group among Zionists, headed by the labor leader David BenGurion, opposed an outright Jewish revolt against the mandate itself, but it undertook active resistance to the restrictions on Jewish immigration. Opposing both binationalism and a demand for a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan, as well as mere restoration of the status quo ante the 1939 White Paper, it was prepared to consider solving the Palestine problem by partition. The world war was victoriously concluded and a Labour government came to power in Britain, but the 1939 White Paper policy was not rescinded. The limited resistance of the major Zionist paramilitary force, the Jewish Agency-controlled Haganah, escalated into a phase of attacks on government installations and, for a period, was combined in a joint assault with the two Revisionistoriented bands. British repressive measures, directed both at the armed Zionist resistance and the refugee ships that sought to run the British blockade, raised violence to such a pitch that recourse to outside arbiters was essential. Beginning with an attempt to resolve the issue by joint action with the United States, through an Anglo—American Inquiry Committee in 1946, England was forced to refer the Palestine problem to the United Nations. A United Nations Special Committee on Palestine turned in a majority proposal for the partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, with a UN-supervised economic union between them and
ZIONISM with UN administration of an internationalized corpus separatum including Jerusalem and Bethlehem. With certain revisions this proposal was passed by the UN General Assembly on November 29, 1947. Accepted by the Jews of Palestine, it was rejected by the Arabs and immediately opposed with violence. The British refused to aid the implementation of the UN resolution in any way and made haste to leave the country. The fighting, restricted in the final months of the mandate to areas no longer garrisoned by British troops or essential to their departure, extended to the whole land after the British withdrawal on May 15, 1948, and, with the invasion by regular Arab armies from across four frontiers, turned into a full-scale war. UN action availed only to interrupt the hostilities with ill-observed truces, until the growing Jewish strength forced the Arab states to enter into armistice negotiations. Thus the state of Israel, proclaimed on May 14, 1948, as the British departed and immediately recognized by the United States and the Soviet Union, maintained its integrity in war and secured its present boundaries under armistice agreements. In this way and to this degree were the political aspirations of Zionism realized. Anti-Zionism and non-Zionism The Zionist idea had ideological opponents in the Jewish community even before it crystallized in an organized movement and even after it culminated in the creation of Israel. But the anti-Zionist groups were always opposed to one another in many crucial attitudes where one or another such group found itself in agreement with the Zionists. This led to parallel efforts toward similar goals or to cooperation in a common task between Zionists and some of their ideological foes. Those anti-Zionists who shared in the major practical Zionist activities in Palestine identified themselves (at least for the duration of that effort) as "non-Zionists" (Halpern 1961, chapters 3-7). Opposition to the idea of nationalism as a solution to the Jewish problem dominated Western Jewry for a century before Zionism arose. It was argued that only illiberal enemies of freedom and equality still believed that Jews were a nation or that Jews hoped to see a Davidic kingdom restored in Zion. On the other hand, long before Zionism, Western Jewish organizations had devoted themselves to what became characteristic Zionist concerns: aid to Jewish emigration from eastern Europe and other trouble spots, general and vocational education, and support of the growing Jewish community in Palestine. Cooperation in such projects
597
began in the 1880s, after the rise of Zionism, with the non-Zionist sponsors holding the main responsibility and control; but the position was reversed after the mandate became effective. Alternating with long periods of cooperation were episodes of ideological conflict—in 1897, from 1914 to 1917, and intermittently from 1937 to 1947—when major political issues arose, evoking sharper definitions of Zionist demands and, in reaction, more elaborate defenses of anti-Zionist views by erstwhile non-Zionists, among others. Only a minor group of privileged Jews, relatively detached from the main community, represented the type of Western anti-Zionist in eastern Europe. Traditionalist Jews, who dominated the communal consensus until late in the nineteenth century, continuously supported the settlement of some Jews in Palestine as a religious duty; but, long before Zionism, they considered sacrilegious and pseudomessianic any resettlement of Palestine in a deliberate plan to hasten the end of the Exile—let alone a rational secular design to solve the Jewish problem. In 1911 traditionalist anti-Zionism achieved a modern form of organization through the founding of Agudat Israel. Socialist, radical anti-Zionism arose as a significant force in eastern Europe more or less simultaneously with Zionism. It condemned the plan to solve the Jewish problem by immigration to Palestine as desertion from the barricades where the battle to solve the whole social problem, and the Jewish problem as part of it, would be fought— eastern Europe. In 1897, the year the World Zionist Organization was founded, the Bund (General Jewish Workers' Union in Poland and Lithuania) was established. Both radical anti-Zionism and traditional eastern European anti-Zionism were thus primarily opposed to the very aspect of Zionism which made cooperation in western Europe possible: the Zionist practical endeavors in Palestine. On the other hand, they shared in general the Zionist view that Jews were not a mere denomination but an ethnic, cultural group in Europe. Accordingly, eastern European Zionist and anti-Zionist Jewish organizations worked on parallel lines to promote Jewish languages and culture, each in its favored mode, and occasionally joined in common struggle for the political prerequisites to all their aims (Vlavianos & Gross 1954). In the years following World War i, opportunities open to Jewish migrants were sharply reduced by the American immigration acts, while nationalist and anti-Semitic pressures against the Jews reached unprecedented heights of ferocity. Pales-
598
ZIONISM
tine became the pre-eminent refuge legally assigned and, until 1939, open with the least onerous restrictions for Jews. The extensive sympathy this won for the national home project from Jews of widely different ideologies was converted by the catastrophes of the war period into organized, institutional support of the community as a whole (Halperin 1961). These circumstances made the major prewar anti-Zionist organizations moderate the substance and tone of their opposition. The Bund's conception of Jews as a national cultural entity had focused primarily on Poland and Lithuania, and the destruction of the bulk of eastern European Jewry destroyed basic assumptions of their ideology. The Bund survives as a minor group devoted to Yiddish culture throughout world Jewry; and it accepts Israel, while criticizing some of its policies from an internationalist, socialist point of view. The main body of Agudat Israel gave up its opposition in principle to the creation of a Jewish state during World War n. Like Mizrachi, it now works within Israel's political system, trying to bring it fully under traditional religious law. Two small organizations, the ultra-Orthodox Natorei Karta ("wardens of the city") of Jerusalem and the American Council for Judaism, Inc., became prominent during and since World War n because of their militant, irreconcilable anti-Zionism. The Natorei Karta, while living in Israel, refuse on religious grounds to recognize the authority of the state. The American Council for Judaism, Inc., alleges that Israel in conjunction with the World Zionist Organization seeks, by constituting a form of political allegiance for all Jews, to confuse the sharp line of distinction which, they argue, separatee Jewish religious adherence from any ethnic bond. Both organizations stand outside the Jewish consensus and in defiance of it. Within the consensus, the Zionist achievement of a Jewish state has blurred the differences between ideological Zionism and non-Zionism, since the organized Jewish community as a whole, without reference to these labels, extends moral and material support to Israel. Achievements and prospects Israel is not only the specific realization of Zionist political aims, but its culture, economy, and social structure bear clear traces of their origins in the ideologies of Zionist factions. The revival of the Hebrew language, the most generally supported aim of Zionism, owes a particular debt to the school of cultural Zionists. Israel's labor settlements, its producers' cooperatives, and its broad and powerful
labor federation are an outgrowth of labor Zionism. The Mizrachi movement has a dominant influence over the religious courts and chief rabbinate, which act in the tradition of religious Zionism. The creation of the Jewish state, a triumph of the policy of the World Zionist Organization, relieved the organization of some of its major functions, but Zionist aims are such that the creation of a state does not completely fulfill them. If all Jews who cannot or would not live in Diaspora countries are to be brought to Zion—as Zionist doctrine requires—the state itself must be a means to this end. This Zionist task is shared by Diaspora Jews through their contributions to the Jewish Agency and membership in the World Zionist Organization, organizations that still play a major role in immigrant resettlement and land reclamation in Israel. Another continuing responsibility is based on the Zionist prediction that the Jewish problem would be solved through the return to Zion. The Zionist movement feels a particular responsibility to stimulate or sponsor educational activities by which Diaspora Jewish communities can share the values created by the revived Hebrew culture in Israel. Thus, Jewish nationalism remains, in a restricted sphere of activities, a continuing organized force in the Diaspora after the rise of the state of Israel. BEN HALPERN [See also ANTI-SEMITISM; JUDAISM; NATIONALISM; NEAR EASTERN SOCIETY, article on ISRAEL; SOCIAL MOVEMENTS.] BIBLIOGRAPHY
BOEHM, ADOLF 1935-1937 Die Zionistische Bewegung. 2 vols. Berlin: Jiidischer Verlag. BRANDEIS, Louis D. 1942 Brandeis on Zionism: A Collection of Addresses and Statements. Washington: Zionist Organization of America. COHEN, ISRAEL (1945) 1946 The Zionist Movement. Edited and revised, with a supplementary chapter on "Zionism in the United States," by Bernard G. Richards. New York: Zionist Organization of America. Esco FOUNDATION FOR PALESTINE, INC. 1947 Palestine: A Study of Jewish, Arab and British Policies. 2 vols. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. HALPERIN, SAMUEL 1961 The Political World of American Zionism. Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press. HALPERN, BEN 1961 The Idea of the Jewish State. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. HERTZBERG, ARTHUR (editor) (1959) 1964 The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader. Cleveland: World. HERZL, THEODOR (1894-1904) 1955 Theodor Herzl: A Portrait for This Age. Edited with an introduction by Ludwig Lewisohn and a preface by David Ben-Gurion. Cleveland: World. -» A selection of Herzl's writings. HERZL, THEODOR (1895-1904) 1960 The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl. 5 vols. New York: Herzl Press. -» First published in German. The English edition con-
ZNANIECKI, FLORIAN tains material left out of the original German collection. NORDAU, MAX 1941 Max Nordau to His People. New York: Scopus. PINSKER, LEO S. (1882-1886) 1944 Road to Freedom: Writings and Addresses. With an introduction by B. Netanyahu. New York: Scopus. H> First published in German. SOKOLOW, NAHUM 1919 History of Zionism: 1600-1918. 2 vols. London: Longmans. STEIN, LEONARD J. 1961 The Balfour Declaration. New York: Simon & Schuster. VLAVIANOS, BASIL J.; and GROSS, FELIKS (editors) 1954 Struggle for Tomorrow: Modern Political Ideologies of the Jewish People. New York: Arts. WEIZMANN, CHAIM 1949 Trial and Error: The Autobiography of Chaim Weizmann. New York: Harper.
ZNANIECKI, FLORIAN Florian Witold Znaniecki (1882-1958) was born in Swiatniki, Poland. He did his undergraduate work at the University of Warsaw but was expelled shortly before receiving his degree—for leading a demonstration against the Russian administration. He pursued his graduate studies at the universities of Geneva, Zurich, Paris, and Cracow, receiving his,doctorate from Cracow in 1909. He began his intellectual career as a poet and turned next to philosophy, a field in which he won an early distinction not only by original contributions but by translating Bergson's Creative Evolution into Polish. Finally, under the influence of W. I. Thomas, he turned away from philosophy and became a sociologist. Philosophy seemed to him to have become a discipline doomed to sterility, whereas sociology opened up new vistas for the future advancement of knowledge. For political reasons Znaniecki was ineligible for an academic post in Poland, and therefore, after taking his doctorate, he found employment in an emigration bureau. It was here that Thomas, on one of his frequent trips to Europe, met Znaniecki. Thomas had begun to interest himself in the problems of immigrants to the United States and particularly in Polish immigrants. He persuaded young Znaniecki to go to the University of Chicago in 1914 and arranged an appointment for him as lecturer in Polish institutions; together they worked on the monumental five-volume study entitled The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, which appeared during the years 1918-1920. In 1919 Znaniecki also published his own first book in English, Cultural Reality, an essay on historical relativism. In the early 1920s Znaniecki returned to Poland, where he became professor of sociology at Poznan and where, in 1922, he founded the Polish Socio-
599
logical Institute. Here he trained many students whose works were to add luster to the history of Polish sociology, and here he wrote his Wstgp do socjologji ("Introduction to Sociology" 1922) and his two-volume Socjologia wychowania ("Sociology of Education" 1928-1930). His book The Laws of Social Psychology appeared in English in 1925. In the early 1930s Znaniecki lectured at Teachers College, Columbia University. In 1934, back again in Poznan, he published The Method of Sociology and, in 1936, his massive Social Actions. In the summer of 1939 he was once more at Columbia, where he delivered a series of lectures that were published, a year later, under the title The Social Role of the Man of Knowledge. The war prevented his return to Poland, and he thereupon accepted an appointment at the University of Illinois, where he spent the last period of his academic career (with the exception of one postretirement year at Wayne State University) and where he wrote his Cultural Sciences and his Modern Nationalities, both published in 1952. In all of his works, both Polish and English, Znaniecki enjoyed the support and assistance of his wife, Eileen Markley Znaniecki. A native of New York City, she was graduated from Smith College, received a master's degree in history at Columbia, and took her doctorate in jurisprudence at the University of Chicago. A scholar in her own right, she nevertheless submerged her career in his and served him throughout their life together as his indispensable amanuensis. Znaniecki's reputation suffered from the fact that he was bilingual. Half of his books were written in Polish and are inaccessible to all but a few American and English readers. His most important contributions to sociology as such, however, are in his English works, and our discussion will focus on five of these. "The Polish Peasant in Europe and America." Although the careers of Thomas and Znaniecki diverged considerably after their collaboration on The Polish Peasant, and although they were fairly far apart in training and temperament, it may be said that the joint enterprise, precisely because of their differences, was an unusually successful one. It is doubtful whether either of them alone could have brought The Polish Peasant to fruition, and neither alone could have made it the sociological classic it is conceded to be. Thomas brought to the work a psychological depth, a comprehensive curiosity, and a rare wisdom. Znaniecki contributed a philosophical sophistication, a historical erudition, and a flair for systematization. The Polish Peasant made at least three major
600
ZNANIECKI, FLORIAN
contributions to sociology, one methodological and the other two substantive. The methodological innovation was the extended use of personal documents, which Thomas and Znaniecki regarded as sociological data par excellence. The two substantive contributions were, first, the linking of attitudes and values in a relationship that staked out a new field for sociological investigation and, second, the famous four wishes—response, recognition, new experience, and security—a variant of an earlier formulation by Thomas. The wishes were not meant to be used in a strictly motivational sense but rather as a taxonomic device to supplant such earlier lists of "interests" as are found in writers like Ratzenhofer and Small. "The Method of Sociology." A claim can be made for the proposition that of all Znanieckfs works The Method of Sociology (1934a) is the most systematic. It offers in a mature form almost all the ideas that characterize his sociological theory. Conscious of the fact that sociology was then in a period of transition from a synthetic science, interested in large generalizations about "society" or "civilization," to an analytic science investigating specific sets of empirical data, he felt it necessary to spell out in some detail the methodological implications of the new approach. He accordingly made three major points in this book. The first was that sociology is a special and not a general social science and that it has its own special subject matter, its own kind of data, shared by no other science; it is therefore of necessity limited to the investigation of a small but important range of phenomena. The second point was that, in opposition to positivistic approaches to the study of society, sociology is concerned with the "essential meaningfulness" of social reality. The third was that although rigorous logical standards are to be observed, sociology is destined for a long time to be a qualitative rather than a quantitative discipline. A number of other salient points appear in The Method of Sociology. Znaniecki argued, for example, that although practical experience teaches us a great deal about social life, it does not suffice for the constitution of scientific knowledge. The same observation applies to the body of ethical and political reflections produced over the centuries : all of it is suggestive, much of it is useful, and some of it may even be "true," but it has no relevance to a systematic sociological theory until it is organized into propositions that lead to generalizations about social actions and social relations. A theoretical science like sociology can prosper only when it uses theoretical criteria and theoretical standards in the accumulation of its facts, the selection of its problems, and the deter-
mination of its data. Znaniecki took a middle ground on the competing claims of theory and research. Neither an undisciplined rationalism nor a planless empiricism could satisfy his criteria for the proper direction of sociological inquiry. Znaniecki was disposed to maintain the NeoKantian distinction between two kinds of systems —natural and cultural—which exhibit differences not only in composition and structure but also in the character of the elements that account for their coherence. Natural systems are objectively given and exist independently of the experience and activity of men. Cultural systems, on the contrary, depend not only for their meaning but also for their existence upon the participation of conscious human agents and upon men's relations with one another. Znaniecki had his own label for this difference. He called it the "humanistic coefficient," and it is this concept that sharply separated his approach from that of most of his contemporaries on the American scene. On the issue of Wertfreiheit, however, he took his position with the majority in insisting that sociology is a categorical and not a normative discipline. Sociology for Znaniecki was a very special kind of inquiry. It was not a natural science; it was not ethics or political philosophy; it was not social psychology (on this point chapter 1 of Social Actions is especially relevant); it was not the purely formal discipline of a Simmel; it was not a general theory of cultural data; and above all it was not a philosophy of history. Sociology was for Znaniecki a science of social systems, systems that fall into four main subdivisions—social actions, social relations, social persons, and social groups. The nature of these subsystems reveals that sociology is a special science that concerns itself with only one kind of cultural system—the social—and not, for example, with such other cultural systems as the technological, economic, religious, or linguistic. Everywhere in his work Znaniecki emphasized the role of conscious agents or actors—an emphasis which his opponents were inclined to criticize as the subjective point of view. It is persons as objects of the actions of others, however, not as subjects, that meet his criteria for sociological data. Among the sources of these data Znaniecki listed the personal experiences of the sociologist, both original and vicarious; observation by the sociologist, both direct and indirect; the personal experience of other people; and the observations of other people. It is this emphasis which supported his use of personal documents in sociological research. "Social Actions." Znaniecki wrote much of Social Actions prior to The Method of Sociology, to judge by the internal evidence and his own
ZNANIECKI, FLORIAN admission that he had worked on Social Actions for 15 years. It is less well organized than The Method of Sociology, less precise in its articulation of the nature of sociology, and it offers less sense of system. Its value lies in its insights both into the interior meaning of various types of actions and into the manner in which an investigation and analysis of actions can contribute to sociological theory. Actions are social not because they conform to norms but because they deal with human beings to whom the agent reacts as conscious objects and with an intent to influence. Znaniecki insisted upon the dynamic quality of social relations and regarded Comte's distinction between social statics and social dynamics as pernicious. The social world is a world in becoming, not a world in being, and for this reason studies of social structure as such are not to be countenanced. They are erroneous in basic premise because there is no such thing as a static action. For the same reason Znaniecki seldom, if ever, used the words "community" or "society," because he thought of them as static concepts that violated his sense of the flux and changefulness of the human scene. He was a follower of Bergson rather than of Descartes. "The Social Role of the Man of Knowledge." In The Social Role of the Man of Knowledge (1940), which exhibits a graceful literary style, Znaniecki asserted once again that sociology is a special, not a general, cultural science. Sociology's legitimate interest in knowledge, therefore, concerns not the relationships that may obtain between knowledge and the sociocultural conditions under which knowledge is produced, but rather the social relations that those who produce knowledge have with one another and with those who receive its benefits. In this book also Znaniecki utilized the concepts of social person and social circle. The circle gives to the person a social status, consisting of rights and privileges, and he in turn performs certain services for the circle. Social persons and social circles are the essential components of social roles, and it was in these terms that he discussed the social role of the man of knowledge, treating in turn the roles of technologists, sages, scholars, and "explorers," the last being those who create new knowledge. The essay is a small masterpiece of sociological literature. "Cultural Sciences." In Cultural Sciences, Their Origin and Development (1952a) Znaniecki transcended the boundaries of sociology proper—boundaries that he himself had tried to chart—and wrote again as a philosopher of culture, thus completing the circle he had begun to trace as a young scholar. For a number of years he had planned to
601
write an outline of the historical evolution of sociology, but he found the subject so intertwined with the development of philosophical and scientific knowledge in general that he had no alternative but to attend to the origin and development of the cultural sciences more generally. Accordingly, he treated such problems as the nature of knowledge, the concept of order, biological and psychological determinants of culture, the relationship of individual entities and collectivities, determinism and creativity, human actions, and axio-normatively ordered systems. In treating such normative systems, he turned from the sociological direction back to his earlier interest in values. Znaniecki advanced to a new position in Cultural Sciences with his assertion that sociology, though specialized, is nevertheless the basic cultural science, just as physics is the basic natural science. As a matter of fact, the importance of sociology in this central role increases to the extent that it limits its task to the comparative study of social systems. It makes other cultural sciences possible because they too deal with social actions and without them there would be no art, no religion, no commerce, no philosophy, and no science. The views that receive expression and emphasis in Znaniecki's works are (1) that sociology is a social and not a natural science and that it is the humanistic coefficient which distinguishes the data of sociology from the data of nature; (2) that sociology is a special and not a general social science, concerned not with everything that happens in society but only with conscious agents as they interact with one another and thus construct systems of social actions; and (3) that the method of sociology can be as objective, as precise, and, indeed, as profound as the method of the physical sciences, notwithstanding the differences between them. The humanistic coefficient is not something to be deplored as detracting from the objectivity of scientific knowledge; rather it is something to be seized upon and utilized in the construction of a scientific sociology. The humanistic coefficient not only justifies but also requires the use of personal experiences as sociological data and thus gives a special meaning and significance to sociological research. ROBERT BIERSTEDT [For the historical context of Znaniecki's work, see the biography of THOMAS. For discussion of the subsequent development of his ideas, see SCIENCE, article On SCIENTISTS; VALUES.] 1910
BIBLIOGRAPHY Zagadnienie wartosci w filozofii (Philosophy of Values). Warsaw: Wende.
602 1912
ZOOSEMIOTICS
Humanizm i poznanie (Humanism and Knowledge). Warsaw: Wende. 1913 Znaczenie rozwoju swiqta i czlowieka (The Meaning of Evolution). Warsaw: No publisher given. (1918-1920) 1958 THOMAS, WILLIAM I.; and ZNANIECKI, FLORIAN. The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. 2 vols., 2d ed. New York: Dover. -> Unabridged edition of the original five-volume work. 1919 Cultural Reality. Univ. of Chicago Press. 1922 Wstep do socjologji (Introduction to Sociology). Poznan (Poland): Gebethner & Wolff. -» Resume in English on pages 451-467. 1925 The Laws of Social Psychology. Warsaw: Gebethner & Wolff. 1928-1930 Socjologia wychowania (The Sociology of Education). 2 vols. Warsaw: Atlas. 1931 Miasto w swiadomosci jego obywateli (The City in the Consciousness of Its Inhabitants). Poznan (Poland): Wydawnictwo Polskiego Instytutu Socjologicznego. 1934a The Method of Sociology. New York: Farrar & Rinehart. 1934b Ludzie terazniejsi a cywilizacja przyszlosci (The People of Today and the Civilization of Tomorrow). Lwow (Poland): Atlas. 1936 Social Actions. New York: Farrar & Rinehart. 1940 The Social Role of the Man of Knowledge. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. 1952a Cultural Sciences, Their Origin and Development. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press.
1952b Modern Nationalities: A Sociological Study. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
ABEL, THEODORE 1958 Florian Znaniecki, 1882-1958. American Sociological Review 23:429-430. BARNES, HARRY E.; and BECKER, HOWARD (1938) 1961 Revival of Interest in National Reconstruction: Znaniecki. Volume 2, pages 1075-1078 in Harry E. Barnes and Howard Becker, Social Thought From Lore to Science. 3d ed., rev. & enl. New York: Dover. GIDIJNSKI, JOSEPH C. 1958 Florian Znaniecki: Original Thinker, Philosopher and Sociologist. Polish Review 3, no. 4:77-87. MARTINDALE, DON 1960 The Nature and Types of Sociological Theory. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. TIMASHEFF, NICHOLAS S. (1955)1957 Sociological Theory: Its Nature and Growth. Rev. ed. New York: Random House. ZNANIECKI, EILEEN M. 1945 Polish Sociology. Pages 703-717 in Georges Gurvitch and Wilbert E. Moore (editors), Twentieth Century Sociology. New York: The Philosophical Library.
ZOOSEMIOTICS See COMMUNICATION, ANIMAL, especially the article on COMMUNICATION MODELS AND SIGNALING BEHAVIOR.
