THE PROSPECTS OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES 



groups. No group ever intends to give its members rights 

 which will weaken it in its struggle with other groups. 

 Moreover, when the latter struggle breaks out in the form 

 of war, or even of economic competition, the traditional 

 and constitutional rights of the individual vanish in a wave 

 of group sentiment which makes group strength and group 

 preservation the primary aim of individual effort. Man is 

 thus, in last analysis, a gregarious animal who, by nature 

 and training, is keyed to an age-old struggle between 

 groups, in which leaders and followers make war upon 

 other leaders and followers, with death or the prizes of 

 life in the balance. At such times the individual is no 

 longer the end but the means; individual happiness and 

 welfare are cast aside, often with a genuine enthusiasm, 

 in order that one's race and blood and all that symbolizes 

 their distinctiveness may survive. At such times society, 

 as an organized, integrated super-entity, becomes a truly 

 Hobbesian Leviathan, absorbing within itself the rights 

 and the wills of its members. 



If, then, society is not a true organism, on the one hand, 

 or an anarchistic aggregation of human beings on the other, 

 it must, nevertheless, be viewed as a going concern having 

 an existence of its own quite apart from that of the indi- 

 viduals who, at a given moment, compose it. Tribe and 

 nation endure, though their individual members perish. 

 Not only is this so, but while they endure, they envelop 

 the life of their members in a scheme of rights and duties, 

 a code of legal and moral rules, a set of social values and 

 objects of emotional loyalties that give order, limit, and 

 definite pattern to individual life and personality. It is, 

 therefore, a perennial problem, with which all the social 

 sciences wrestle, to determine when, to what extent, and 

 for what purposes the individual may be freed from group 

 domination to pursue his own wayward and centrifugal 

 tendencies. The political scientist debates the reconciliation 



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