INTEGRATIVE LEVELS 



ganglia.^ The human brain, indeed, is the outward and visible sign 

 of the most fundamental of human characteristics, that by virtue of 

 which sociology is a higher level than biology; the possession of 

 consciousness. It follows that the more control consciousness has 

 over human affairs, the more truly human, and hence super-human, 

 man will become. Now the common ownership of the means of 

 production implies the consciously planned control of production. 

 No longer is production to be governed by the self-acting mechanism 

 of profitability; it is to be carried on for communal use. No longer, at 

 a given conjuncture of the world-market, will so many dozen factories 

 automatically go out of action in some far corner of the earth, throwing 

 some thousands of workers into immediate poverty, and diverting 

 the energies of the owners into other channels. No longer will thermo- 

 dynamic efficiency and geographic common sense alike be turned 

 upside down at the irrational dictates of a profit-making system. By 

 the deliberate decisions of a central planning body the production 

 and distribution of goods will be consciously organised. Spencer 

 might well have welcomed such a body as the real analogue of the 

 higher nervous centres for which he had to seek in contemporary 

 society in vain. Its rationalisation of the irrational in terms of practice 

 will be the precise counterpart of the rationalisation of the irrational 

 in terms of theory which the scientific method carries out in research 

 every day. 



But this vast extension of conscious control could not take place 

 without the willing conscious co-operation of the constituent effector 

 persons. In Vaughan's discussion of Rousseau there is a fine passage 

 on the conception of the State.^ "It is of the essence of Rousseau's 

 theory," writes Vaughan, ''that the State is no power which imposes 

 itself from without; that, on the contrary, it is more truly part of 

 the individual than the individual himself. The change he wrought 

 in the conception of the individual involves a corresponding change 

 in the conception of the State. The bureaucratic machinery, which 

 had slowly fastened itself on Europe, is thrown to the winds. Its 



"•^ The processes of "rationalisation" in industry offer another parallel. When the 

 American Railway Association reduces the number of types of axles from 59 to 5 

 numerical complexity decreases but organisation increases. Mere complexity has, of 

 course, nothing to do with organisation — it may mean confusion only — and purposed 

 reduction of complexity at a lower level is in the interest of activities at higher levels. 

 Industrial standardisation is an example which would have appealed greatly to Herbert 

 Spencer, the railway engineer. 



^ The Political Writings of J. J. Rousseau, edited with introduction and notes by 

 C. E. Vaughan (Cambridge, 191 5), p. 112. 



263 



