The Process of Social Change

The Process of Social Change
Author(s): Charles H. Cooley

Source: Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Mar., 1897), pp. 63-81
Published by: The Academy of Political Science
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THE PROCESS OF SOCIAL CHANGE.
THE phrases "natural selection," "the survival of the

fittest" and ,the struggle for existence," with others
that come from the Origiin of Species and the Synthetic Philos-
ophy, are now applied to social phenomena and circulate very
generally as descriptions of what goes on among mankind.
Some people would question, however, whether they do not, as
is alleged of our silver dollars, pass rather on the credit of their
authors than on the value of any definite ideas commonly asso-
ciated with them.
In the use of such phrases there does, indeed, appear to be
a great deal of vagueness; and it is one object of this paper to
do something toward clearing it up -to find out, if possible,
whether these dubious tokens are in any way exchangeable for
standard coin of the realm of thought and fact. With this
end in view I purpose first to inquire how far natural selection
of the primary, animal sort taught by Darwin is a process of
social change; and then, if it appears that there is another
process, I shall go on to consider its nature and operation.
The inquiry falls conveniently into three divisions:
I. Natural selection as a process of social change.

II. Social change, proper.
III. The influence of communication upon social change.
I.
So far as concerns the different race elements in the popu-

lation of the earth, the Darwinian idea of change by survival -
the idea that what exists does so because it has prevailed at
some time or other in a struggle for existence - is not at all a
speculation, but the most verifiable thing in the world. There
may be doubt about other species, but in the case of homo the
process has gone on in the light of history and continues in full
64 POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARYERLY. [Vol,. XII.
vigor at the present time. It would be difficult to find any

large region where one race, nation or tribe is not increasing
in numbers at the expense of the diminution of some other.
Mr. Galton finds that " there are probably hardly any spots on
the earth that have not, within the last few thousand years,
been tenanted by very different races" ; 1 and "that on the
average at least three different races are to be found in every
moderately sized district on the earth's surface." His impres-
sion of the races in South Africa " was one of a continual state
of ferment and change, of the rapid development of some clan
here and of the complete or almost complete suppression of
another clan there." We are ourselves a part of this process.
We are in the midst of a rapid and complicated movement of
which the general direction is sufficiently clear, though the
details are concealed. The European races are almost every-
where on the increase: within the present century they have
nearly trebled in number, and with the Teutonic peoples in the
lead, and the English at the head of these, have spread and
multiplied over a great part of the earth.2 In the United States
we have seen the Indian go and the negro stay; while in our
cities and our newer farming regions there is active competition
among recent immigrants from all the European stocks, and
between these and the descendants of immigrants of earlier
date.
If the student turns, however, from the competition of races
to inquire what is going on within any particular race, he does
not find it so easy to learn what natural selection is doing:
indeed, it is not easy to show that it is making any change that
is of moment. Suppose, for example, that he were to inquire
what alterations, aside from those due to intermixture with other
1 Inquiries into Human Faculty, pp. 3I0 et seq.
2 According to Hubner's Tables the population of Europe in I895 was about
366 millions. In i8oi it was 175 millions. Levasseur calculates the number of
Europeans out of Europe to have been 91 millions in i8oo and 9Il in i89o. -La
Population Fran9aise, vol. iii, ch. ix. Professor Brinton states that the white race
two centuries ago numbered ioo millions, or about I0 per cent of the population
of the earth; while at the present time the European branches alone number 500
millions, or one-third of the population of the earth. - See his Races and Peoples,
page 298.
No. i.] THE PROCESS OF SOCIAL CHANGE. 65
races, the English stock has undergone within historic time.

To understand the nature of this question one must remember
that great changes may come to pass in the institutions,
manners, morals, and even in the outward appearance of a
people, which do not necessarily imply that any organic change
has taken place in the stock, either through natural selection
or otherwise. If an English couple settles in this country, the
children will contract from our climate and society peculiarities
of appearance and behavior that will mark them as Americans
to the eyes of all the world; but these changes have little to
do with natural selection, and it is uncertain whether they can
in any degree be transmitted by heredity. So, also, those
transformations which make up the rise and fall of nations are
chiefly, if not altogether, of the same quality. They take place
far too rapidly to be due to natural selection or to any organic
change in the race. Decadence seems to be a social deteriora-
tion that drags down the individual by subjecting him to un-
wholesome influences. Thus, there is no evidence that the
Chinamen or Spaniards of to-day are congenitally much different
from their ancestors in the proudest days of those nations:
their degeneracy is apparently of the same character as that
observed in the behavior of a group of boys who have fallen
into bad ways.' It is a decline of tone, of morale, of institu-
tions, not of natural capacity.
The decisive illustration of the possible divergence between
natural selection and social change is the fact that institutions
hostile to survival, like the monastic system, can spread and
flourish for centuries in defiance of animal heredity.
1 "t The Spanish-American of pure white blood, whose ancestors have lived for
three centuries in tropical America, the citizen of the United States who traces
his genealogy to the passengers in the MayJfower or the Welcome, have departed
extremely little from the standard of the Andalusian or the Englishman of to-day
though the contrary is often asserted by those who have not personally studied
the variants in the countries compared. Conditions of climate and food materially
impress the individual, but not the race. The Greeks of Nubia are as dark as
Nubians, but let their children return to Greece and the Nubian hue is lost.
This is a general truth and holds good of all the slight impressions made upon
pure races by unaccustomed environments." - Brinton, Races and Peoples, pp.
44, 45-
66 POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY. [VOL. XII.
The scientific test of organic difference would be to take

new-born infants typical of the stocks to be compared and note
what unlikenesses they developed when brought up under the
same social influences. Rude comparisons of this sort are
possible between contemporary peoples, but they are, of course,
impracticable between different periods in the history of the
same race. In the case of the Jews the matter has been studied
as thoroughly as the nature of the inquiry permits, and it is
thought doubtful whether that race has undergone any note-
worthy change since the time of Moses.' As regards our own
and kindred peoples -always leaving aside the mixture of races
- I imagine that few anthropologists would venture to say any-
thing positive. If they did, it is quite certain that there would
be no agreement among them as to what the direction of change
is. Many suppose, for example, that physical vigor is declining
by disuse, by the growing preponderance of intellect as a factor
in success, by the preservation of weakly children and by the
support through charity of pauperism and vice.2 There is,
however, no direct proof of a decline; and it is quite possible
that the forces mentioned are more than counterbalanced by
others which may be held to have an opposite tendency, such
as better and more regular nourishment, the more general prac-
tice of systematic exercise, congenial marriages and the improve-
ment of a great variety of degrading social conditions. Either
side of this argument may be maintained by plausible a priori
arguments, and in the present insufficiency of direct evidence
there is no way to reach a definite conclusion.
It is even possible to question whether the thinking faculties
are now stronger than they used to be. There has certainly
been a great deal of mental work of various kinds among the
Teutonic peoples since the revival of learning; but even
if we suppose that the effect of such exercise can be inherited,
we have still to consider that only a small fraction of the
race has taken part in it. Moreover, when we see that the
1 See papers by Neubauer and Jacobs in vol. xv of the Journal of the Anthropo-
logical Institute.
2 For an admirable discussion of the influence of charity upon survival, see
Warner, American Charities, ch. v.
men who lead in letters, science and statesmanship often spring

from a peasant class whose forefathers have not shared appre-
ciably in the intellectual activities of the past, it is clear that
ancestral culture is not essential in producing eminence of this
sort. It is significant, too, that one of the most noteworthy
intellectual influences now at work comes from the Russians, a
people new to civilization. In short, if we could transplant a
few thousand babies out of our remote ancestry and give them
modern nurture and training, they might, for aught we know,
turn out their share of Congressmen, novelists and electrical
engineers, and be little distinguishable in any way from the rest
of the population. The statue called " The Dying Gladiator "
represents a possible ancestor of more than two thousand years
ago; yet he appears to me quite modern and familiar - a little
wild perhaps, as we might expect from his mode of life, but
otherwise such a man as we might come across almost anywhere
at the present time.
Natural selection, apart from the conflict of races, is appar-
ently much more active in preserving than in changing types,
for it discourages wide deviation in any direction. Out-and-out
criminals and those sunk in self-destructive vices are not, as a
class, prolific; but no more are the people of conspicuous
intellectual or moral power. It is the intermediate and undis-
tinguished multitude that keeps up the population.
Some entertain the notion that the most degraded classes
are the most prolific; but I know of no support for this.
Among the conditions of a rapid natural increase are physical
vigor and a fairly stable family life. In both of these respects
the pauper and criminal classes are decidedly inferior to the
rest of the population. On the other hand, many suppose that
success and survival go together -that what we call competi-
tion is only a more or less mitigated form of the struggle for
existence; and that as a rule and in the long run those who
gain wealth, power, and other things for which men strive, are
enabled to leave more children than others and so to perpetuate
those characteristics to which they owe their success. It is
often assumed that this is too clearly the case to require special
investigation; but this assumption will appear rash to any one

at all familiar with statistics, and seems to have arisen, not
from the direct study of mankind, but by a hasty inference from
the results of biology. Men of unusual success are not un-
usually prolific: so far as can be made out from statistics they
are as a class below the average in this respect. Indeed, a very
plausible argument, backed by figures ad libit/im, might be
prepared to show that the successful do not survive and are
therefore the unfit. Certainly nature's standard of success
that is, survival - is quite distinct from the social standard;
and to a great degree the two are opposed. To marry early
and raise a large family is by no means favorable to the grati-
fication of personal ambition. It seems, therefore, that con-
spicuous failure and conspicuous success are about equally
unfavorable to survival, and that those paths which diverge
very widely from the main-traveled road of ordinary humanity
lead to extinction.
This conservatism in the conditions of survival is well illus-
trated by the case of educated women. They seem to be, on
the whole, a very beneficent class of persons, and one whose
progressive spirit it would be well to transmit in every possible
manner; yet we cannot expect that the women who belong to
it will leave as many children as those whose entire energy goes
into reproduction. In fact, a large part of college women do
not marry at all; and the remainder are likely to marry later
and to have children at less frequent intervals than other
women.1
It is, accordingly, not at all clear that natural selection,
aside from the prevalence of races, acts definitely or rapidly as a
cause of social change. No doubt the races of men, and
especially those whose history is eventful, undergo more or
less organic transformation : this must have been so in the
past, since otherwise new types could not have originated; and
it is not likely that the process has altogether ceased. This
I See the Report of the Mass. Labor Bureau for i885 on1 " The Health Stati
of Female College Graduates"; also "The Marriage Rate of College Women,"
Thze Ceutury, Oct. I895.
transformation, however, is probably slow, and its character

and direction are difficult to make out: the whole matter, in-
volving as it does the laws of heredity, requires and will no
doubt receive the most thorough study. In the meantime, it
is apparent that natural selection of this simple, animal sort is
not the ordinary process of social change. It has little to do
with the rise, spread and decay of architecture, music, painting
or poetry, or of the great religious systems; it is not the process
by which governments become milder, popular education ad-
vances and manners meliorate; nor is it that by which new
views prevail about childhood and the status of women.
II.
The process which generates opinions, moral standards and

institutions, and which results in progress or decadence, is
especially characteristic of human life, though it is thought
to be operative in some measure among all the social animals.
It rests upon the imitative, sympathetic and intellectual facul-
ties, and is related to natural selection through the probability
that these faculties have an evolutionary history in which
natural selection plays a part.
It would not be difficult to show that the higher faculties of
man are not, as some suppose, elements quite apart from and
inconsistent with the struggle for existence, but are decisive
factors in it while it endures, though tending to supplant it by
rational and sympathetic cooperation. Imitation and sympathy,
as well as intellect, are conditions of social power; and the evi-
dence that they have arisen by the aid of natural selection is
similar to, though much less tangible than, that which indicates
that our bodily frame has thus arisen. It is not, however, im-
portant that I should discuss this question: it is sufficient to
note the fact that our ascendency over the other creatures is
associated with a flexibility of nature that comes from imita-
tion and sympathy, and makes us apt for social change.
A man is not so much strong in himself as formed to make
part of a strong whole. If reared from his birth by some wild
creature and so cut off from those communicated arts and

actions for which alone he is well fitted, he would make a
poor struggle for existence, and might have to fall back upon
his primitive skill in climbing trees. But in society he is
strong; and the chief element of his strength is the fact that
he is so far dominated by imitative and sympathetic faculties,
that he adapts himself to an infinite variety of activities. He
is, on the whole, a docile, conforming animal, and owes his
power to his amenability.
The trend of psychological and sociological studies is dis-
tinctly toward the conclusion that the social factor in indi-
vidual conduct is greater than has been perceived.' Every
thought and every act guided by thought bears some relation
to the social environment, past or present, and could not be
the same if that were altogether different. A man is born with
energies and tendencies, strong but vague, which, being incited
and nourished by the world into which he comes, mingle indis-
tinguishably with it to form a new organic whole, a character
and a career. Imitativeness, which controls so many of our
actions without our knowing it; the fear of disapproval, which
leads to conformity, not only in dress and manners, but in the
gravest parts of conduct; the hope of approbation, inciting
aggressive spirits to perform daring deeds in the sight of
mankind; hero-worship, patriotism, sympathy and love - all
these give to society control over its members. The passion
to be something in the minds and hearts of men is the very life
of life, the fire which fuses individual energies into social power.
Where our faculties touch this stream of human interest they
glow at a white heat, like a piece of ore where it touches the
streaming flame of the blow-pipe; the rest of us remains cold,
inactive and unnoticed.
This need of approval is often called weakness and is con-
1 It is hardly necessary to support this statement by references: the studies in

"1 imitation," by Tarde, Baldwin anid others, and Professor Giddings's theory of the
"consciousness of kind " are familiar examples of the fact stated. The Proceedings
of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections for 1896 contain (page
399) a paper by the present writer on " ' Nature versus Nurture' in the Making of
Social Careers" which treats briefly one phase of the matter.
No. I.] THE PROCESS OF SOCIAL CHANGE. 71
trasted with the supposed strength of self-sufficiency; but in

fact no man with any humanity in him is self-sufficient, and
the love of approbation is weakness only when it leads to
inconstant behavior. It is likely to be strongest in the finest
organizations, and can hardly be extirpated: to try to get rid of
it is to act like a man immersed in water, who should try to
thrust the water from him with his hand. The most that
men can do- and this is all-important-is to choose their
approvers, perhaps substituting remote or even imaginary
persons for those at hand, reading great books, observing
wise persons, and thus cultivating a sense of heroic opinion.
Since all must be hero-worshippers, it is a great thing to have
the right sort of hero.
Human nature is hard to change, but its most inveterate
quality is a susceptibility to social influences. We need to
distinguish sharply between nature and conduct: one is the
stable basis for infinite variety in the other. Association may
not change nature, but it usually controls conduct. It will
hardly make an irascible man patient or a dull one clever, but
it may easily make one clever man an engineer and another
an ingenious burglar. A career never comes by nature alone;
the same nature will result in any one of a hundred careers,
according to the influences that act upon it. We are bound
to our fellows by heredity as to what is relatively permanent,
and by influence as to what is plastic: human nature is trans-
mitted by the one, institutions, conduct and opinion by the
other.
It is this plasticity which makes each of us not so much
strong in himself as fit to make part of a strong whole. Our
thinking and feeling are not, like the animal instincts, pre-
determined to work for a single object, but are unspecialized,
working according to principles of general utility toward ends
set before us by the society in which we live. We are so
happily contrived that humanity can progress without a
change in human nature, through the peculiar constitution
of the nature we already have. A due measure of con-
formity is, accordingly, one of the conditions of social prog-
ress. The conforming influences are often deplored, as by

Emerson, where he says that "society is in a conspiracy against
the independence of each of its members," and that " to be a
man is to be a non-conformist." This is true, in a way, and
helpful; but it is also true that conformity is a social discipline
from which no one can or ought to be entirely free. It levels
up as well as down, prevents crime and anarchy as well as
hinders genius, and knits men together into a strong yet
tractable whole. A party of explorers who are on a difficult
march must keep together, even if they cannot agree upon
the best route; and most men are necessarily so constituted
that they have no inclination to leave the ranks.
Human evolution, then, like animal evolution, rests pri-
marily upon power; but power rests upon cooperation, and
cooperation involves social discipline and individual amena-
bility. Mankind is strong through good understanding, through
the timely abnegation of strife, through institutions that sym-
bolize and confirm social unity -above all through a human
nature that is not only intellectual but imitative, conforming,
sympathetic and capable of congregate enthusiasms.
This imitative and sympathetic human nature, which is a
means to social power, implies the process of social change.
Working and worked upon through the marvelous mechanism
of language, it is capable of fusing men together into a fluid
whole, every part of which in some way feels and responds
to the motion of every other part. In this fluid are propa-
gated an infinite number of movements of thought and action,
among which - by the law of chances, if for no better reason,
- opportune variations from time to time occur. Their oppor-
tuneness being in some measure perceived, these innovations
tend to be preserved and accumulated, rooting themselves in
tradition and tendency, and getting themselves set forth to
the mind and eye in laws, creeds and architecture. It is
of such movements that historical change chiefly consists.
The process is one of survival, in which the conscious selec-
tion of men is an important factor; but the consciousness is
mostly limited to the immediate detail. It is only recently
that the general trend of social movements is beginning to

be in some degree a matter of knowledge and of choice. In
describing the process of social change it is suggestive to liken
it to a wave or a combination of waves; but, as commonly
happens in attempting to set forth social facts as analogous
to physical phenomena, this figure falls hopelessly short of
the truth. A reasonably clear perception of the matter can
come only by a study of the process of communication- a
study which is the key to the translation of the facts of social
change from the language of psychology to that of history.
The two things that must always cooperate are human nature
and the mechanism of communication. The first is a rela-
tively permanent factor; but the second is highly variable,
and is for that reason of peculiar interest and importance.
Its variations have generally been in the direction of greater
efficiency, and it is largely because of this fact that the history
of the past two thousand years is a record of rapid and
accelerating social change.
III.
We know that man is a sympathetic, communicating animal;

and I have urged that this is what makes him amenable, plas-
tic, fit to be formed by a social environment. But what forms
the environment ? The evolution of environment is the most
momentous change in history.
A man's social environment embraces all persons with whom
he has intelligence or sympathy, all influences that reach
him. If I read Aristotle, my environment extends back two
thousand years; if I read the dispatches from Japan, it takes
in the antipodes. That I can be influenced by the Iliad, the
New Testament and other utterances of men distant from
me in time and place, is due to the arts of writing, printing
and transportation, just as the fact that I can receive a com-
plex thought from my neighbor is due to the art of speech.
In other words, the social influences act through a mechanism;
and the character of their action depends upon the character
of the mechanism. The existinz system of communication
determines the reach of the environment. Society is a matter

of the incidence of men upon one another; and since this
incidence is a matter of communication, the history of the
latter is the foundation of all history. It is perhaps worth
while to recall some of the more obvious facts of this history,
and to make some suggestions as to what they mean.
The mechanism of communication includes, of course, ges-
ture, speech, writing, printing, mails, telephones, telegraphs,
photography, the technique of the arts and sciences -all the
ways through which thought and feeling can pass from man
to man.
Speech no doubt knit prehistoric men into groups and enabled
them to emerge into history with a social nature and social
institutions. But as an instrument of social organization speech
has great defects; it lacks range in both time and place. It
can go only where the man goes; and though it can pass from
man to man, and so from generation to generation, it flows in a
slender and wandering stream, limited in capacity, and diverted
in direction by every mind through which it passes. What
would the New Testament or the works of Plato now be if
they had come down to us by this route?
For the precarious strand of oral tradition writing substitutes
strong bonds, numerous and indestructible, reaching all times
and countries where the art is practiced and binding history
firmly together. It makes possible wide political sway, which
cannot well be organized and maintained without recorded laws
and precise instructions ;1 it permits the advance of science,
which is a cumulative achievement that implies the hoarding of
knowledge in dusty manuscripts; it is the condition of a diver-
sified literature, for tradition, which cannot carry much, limits
itself to what is most prized, chiefly stories: writing, in short,
may without much exaggeration be said to underly all social
enlargement and individual specialization. It extends immeas-
urably the environment of all persons who can read and can zet
1 I believe there is no instance of a people which has attained a definite,
extended and stable political organization without the use of some form of
writing. Compare Gibbon's observations in the Decline and Fall, vol. i, p. 354
(Milman-Smith edition).
hold of the manuscripts; and it permits one to form his own

environment by retaining what suits him from a variety of
materials, and by opening communication with congenial minds
in remote times and places. In so doing each individual, of
course, becomes a center for the distribution of what he receives,
and extends the environment of many others. Mankind thus
attains cooperation, continuity and the capacity for rational and
enduring progress.
The particular function of printing is to make communication
general or democratic. So long as handwriting was the only
means of record, books were costly, newspapers were not to be
thought of and direct access to the stores of thought and feeling
was the privileg-e of a few. Under such conditions opportunity
was like the early sun: it lit up a hilltop here and there, but
left the plain in shadow. Printing, to put it otherwise, may
not make the stream of knowledge deeper or improve the taste
of the water, but it does open a path along the margin and
give every one a cup from which to drink. With popular edu-
cation, which is its natural complement, it forms the principal
free institution, without which no other sort of freedom could
long endure, and by the aid of which we may hope to gain more
freedom than we have.
It is well worth while to reflect what these changes mean to
the individual man, born with the aptitude for indefinite devel-
opment through an imitative and sympathetic nature. Consider,
for instance, a group of our ancestors of several thousand years
ago, comparatively small, without the art of writing and with
little knowledge of other groups. Primitive life is a field fertile
in controversy and one not likely to be exhausted; but most
students will admit the probability that our distant forefathers
lived in small societies, were unlettered and had the vaguest
notions about the rest of mankind. Such groups carried on
with one another a true struggle for existence; but within each
of them -that is, within the range of possible good under-
standing - there was an active social life. Mothers loved their
children and men fought for their chiefs; the thoughts and acts
of all were bound together by imitation, the need of approbation
and the communicative motives in general. In this social

medium were propagated such movements of change as its
dimensions permitted. But think of the narrowness of those
dimensions, of the paucity of models for imitation, of the
extreme vagueness of knowledge regarding the great men of
the past and of the total ignorance regarding those of other
societies ! A meagre environment limited the development of
innate tendencies and capacities, and the comparative sameness
of thought and action reflected the narrowness of the general life.
In such a state of things all the wider social relations must
be either hostile or authoritative. Since communication is the
precise measure of the possibility of social organization, of
good understanding among men, relations that are beyond its
range are not truly social, but mechanical. In justice to the
past we must recognize that before the rise of printing and
telegraphy it was impossible for the mass of people in any large
state to have a free and conscious relation to the social whole.
The basis for a social consciousness did not exist. People in
general could not comprehend what was going on, and their
actions were necessarily regulated by authority. The peasant,
the common soldier, could not cooperate in the larger social
movements except as a truck horse cooperates in movements of
trade.
If two persons who cannot understand each other come in
contact, three things are possible: they can separate, they can
fight or one can enslave the other. In the same way, the
social groups of the ancient world could ignore one another,
wage war or be bound by coercion into a mechanical whole.
As the first was usually impracticable, and as mechanical union
proved stronger than none, it was the third course that com-
monly prevailed. This was especially the case after communi-
cation was advanced to such a point that the organization of
extensive military despotisms became practicable. In antiquity
a large free state could not be formed, and a small one could
not maintain itself.
If we put together these things, this poverty of influences
and this habit of war that could be replaced only by something
No. I.] THE PROCESS OF SOCIAL CHANGE. 77
in the way of servitude, we have gone far in explaining the known

differences between our remote forefathers and ourselves. They
may have been very unlike us, but it is not necessary to suppose
that they were, in order to explain their leading unlike lives.
To the man of to-day society, tending now to become a
cooperating whole through that extension of knowledge and
sympathy which has come with the rise of communication, offers
a selection among many environments. In the relation between
himself and the rest of mankind he takes more and more
an active part, accumulating the elements of a characteristic
environment by the working of elective affinity. One may be
an imitator - as indeed all must be - and yet unfold, through
imitation, a character different from that of every one else. The
breadth and diversity of life, dependent upon communication
and daily widening before our eyes, tends, in short, to set man
free by opening to his sympathetic and conforming nature a
" proud choice of influences." He is not merely, as in primi-
tive times, a member of a social group which tends to shape
his thought and action; he is the point of intersection of many
groups, each of which, though dispersed in time and place, has
a real and definite influence upon him. Nowadays one is not
less dependent upon social influences than formerly, but he is
less dependent upon the particular ones that happen to be near-
est him. Every book, every newspaper, every work of sculp-
ture, painting or music to which one has access, every person
or place brought within his reach by the facility of travel, is a
shop which he may enter to examine the goods and buy if he
will. A million environments solicit him; there is eager
competition in place of monopoly.
It is upon this multiplicity of accessible influences, and not
upon any radical change in human nature, that the present
variety and comparative freedom of individual development
chiefly rest. If one looks at the circle of his acquaintances he
sees nothing of the sameness that prevails among savages;
each man has distinctive opinions and modes of action, and
so appears to stand by himself. This deceptive appearance
is due to the fact that social relations are no longer con-
78 POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY. [VOL. XI I.
trolled by mere contiguity. Through the arts of intercourse

association is throwing off the gross and oppressive bonds of
time and place, and substituting congenial relations of sympathy
and choice. So, if a man seems to stand alone, it is mostly
because he stands with those who are not visible ; if he seems
not to keep step with the procession, it is probably because, as
Thoreau said, he hears a different drummer. We know little
of the influences that formed his early imaginations, or of those
persons whose approval he now desires and to whose examples
and opinions he tries to conform his actions. They are often
far distant -his parents and early friends, perhaps, or the
leaders of his profession, or book-people - but the fact remains
that character and conduct are nourished upon social influences.
A reading of autobiographies, or a perusal of those private
records which people carry in their memories, would show that
men are still imitators and hero-worshippers. This is particu-
larly true of children, who spend much of their mental life in
imagining scenes wherein by glorious actions they gain the
applause of some persons they admire. And of course the
modes of thinking and acting that originate in sympathy and
admiration tend, like everything else we do, to become habit,
and to persist amid circumstances very different from those
in which they began, seeming then to come from self-sufficient
personality.
The same conditions favor also the more conspicuous forms
of individuality -that is, originality and genius. Originality
is not something independent of surroundings, but rather a
characteristic way of reacting upon them. Let a man be as
original as you please, he can unfold and express his originality
only through such influences and materials as are accessible,
and the number and variety of these are matters of comnmunica-
tion. " We are indeed born with faculties," said Goethe, who
gave lifelong study to this matter, "but we owe our develop-
ment to a thousand influences of the great world, from which
we appropriate to ourselves what we can and what is suitable
to us." In order to have genius it is essential that a remark-
able child shall be born into the world; but an outfit of natural
faculties, however remarkable, is only one of two sets of factors

whose product is a career. A gifted child, like an acorn, has
indeed the capacity of marvelous growth, but can come to
nothing unless it finds fit nutriment. The idea of a necessary
antagonism between individuality and association is an illusion.
The two are mutually dependent: they have always developed,
and always must develop, side by side. As a rule, it is not too
much association that cramps us, but the wrong kind.
Finally, it is not hard to see how this enlargement of inter-
course has affected the processes of social change. Let us go
back to the comparison with waves, which, after all, is better
than none. As regards the transmission of influences, primitive
societies may be likened to narrow strips of water. They
extended more in time than in place, but even in the former
direction were liable to be cut off by conquest or decay; they
were connected with one another by the shallows and marshes
of occasional intercourse and by quickly subsiding freshets of
federation. Social change was necessarily local, like the waves
on such small waters. Modern society, on the other hand, is
more like the uninterrupted ocean, upon which the waves of
change meet with no obstacles except one another, and roll as
high and as far as the propagating impulse can carry them.
Thus, to take a conspicuous instance, certain movements in art,
letters and philosophy, originating we scarcely know how or
where, but attaining great height among the Greeks, rolled on
over the unconscious Middle Ages till they struck the contem-
poraries of Petrarch and thence were propagated in widening
circles to the present time. The invention of writing opened
the world to the competition of social institutions very much as
maritime navigation opened it to the competition of races. The
field was enlarged, and all movements proceeded on a great
scale.'
This extension of the medium of change is accompanied by
' There is no better illustration of this than the rise of vast religious systems
based upon the recorded lives and maxims of their founders. It is quite possible
that individuals of transcendent character appeared in prehistoric times; but the
imitation of them could not be organized into extensive and enduring systems
without the aid of authentic records.
8o POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERL Y. [VOL. XI I.
an equally remarkable differentiation within it, implied in what

I have already said about the growth of individuality. There
are as many social media as there are specialized groups of
sympathetic and communicating individuals, and in choosing
his environment a man chooses what groups he will belong to.
Each of these groups or media is subject to movements more
or less peculiar to itself; it has in some measure its own
opinions, institutions and traditions. So, if one wishes to
liken modern social movements to waves, he must conceive an
indefinite number of wave-transmitting fluids, interpenetrating
one another as the light-bearing ether interpenetrates the
sound-bearing air; each of these transmitting most readily
undulations originating in itself, yet feeling the influence of
those originating in the others ; each fluid by itself, as well as
the united whole, traversed continually by a multitude of waves
having eve-ty imaginable difference in force, period and direc-
tion. Even when so stated the comparison is still inadequate
in various ways, chiefly in that it does not suggest the active
part that may be taken by individuals. It represents what
would happen if each one were in equilibrium, with every con-
genial relation established ; when in fact each of us is continu-
ally stirring about more or less in search of the congenial -
resisting, refracting or augmenting the social impulse in a way
peculiar to himself. Yet, so far as men have like natures that
come into sympathy through communication, they really form
a sort of a fluid in which impulses are propagated by simple
suggestion or contact. If two persons of like feeling for form
and color stand before a painting, they and the artist are one
through the picture.
The freer development of individuals involves, of course, a
freer development of the social order; inasmuch as relations of
choice - relations that suit the feelings of men - tend to
spread and to prevail over those of hostility or coercion. It is
the tendency of communication to give human nature a fair
chance, levelling before it the barriers of ignorance, blind hos-
tility and constraint of place, and permitting man to organize
his higher sympathetic and xsthetic impulses.
No. I.] THE PROCESS OF SOCIAL CHANGE. 8i
Within the past fifty years there have been developed new
means of communication, - fast mails, telegraphs, telephones,
photography and the marvels of the daily newspaper, -all tend-
ing to hasten and diversify the flow of thought and feeling and
to multiply the possibilities of social relation. The working of
these agencies is too important to be discussed hastily, and to
discuss it fully would carry me too far; I shall therefore only
point out that they make all influences quicker in transmission
and more general in their incidence, accessible at a greater dis-
tance and to a larger proportion of the people. So far as
concerns the general character of social change, the effect may
be described as a more perfect liquefaction of the social medium.
A thick, inelastic liquid, like tar or molasses, will transmit only
comparatively large waves; but in water the large waves bear
upon their surface countless wavelets and ripples of all sizes
and directions. So if we were to compare the society of to-day
with that of fifty years ago, we should find that great changes
are somewhat facilitated, and that there is added to them a
multitude of small changes which in former times could not
have extended beyond the reach of personal contact. Light
ripples now run far: the latest fashion in coats or books perme-
ates the back counties and encircles the earth.
The process of change that I have described involves selec-

tion, and is perhaps as natural as anything else. Hence we
may, if we choose, call it natural selection. It comes about
through the competition of influences and the propagation of
opportune innovations in thought and action. The selective
principle, the arbiter of competition, is ever human nature-
but human nature conditioned in its choices by the state of
communication, which determines what influences are acces-
sible, as well as by the constraining momentum of its own past.
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN. CHARLEs H. COOLEY.

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The Process of Social Change

Author(s): Charles H. Cooley

THE phrases "natural selection," "the survival of the

I. Natural selection as a process of social change.

So far as concerns the different race elements in the popu-

vigor at the present time. It would be difficult to find any

races, the English stock has undergone within historic time.

The scientific test of organic difference would be to take

men who lead in letters, science and statesmanship often spring

investigation; but this assumption will appear rash to any one

transformation, however, is probably slow, and its character

The process which generates opinions, moral standards and

creature and so cut off from those communicated arts and

1 It is hardly necessary to support this statement by references: the studies in

trasted with the supposed strength of self-sufficiency; but in

ress. The conforming influences are often deplored, as by

that the general trend of social movements is beginning to

We know that man is a sympathetic, communicating animal;

determines the reach of the environment. Society is a matter

hold of the manuscripts; and it permits one to form his own

and the communicative motives in general. In this social

in the way of servitude, we have gone far in explaining the known

trolled by mere contiguity. Through the arts of intercourse

faculties, however remarkable, is only one of two sets of factors

an equally remarkable differentiation within it, implied in what

The process of change that I have described involves selec-

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN. CHARLEs H. COOLEY.

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