Herbert Spencer: The functions and systems of sustaining and distributing among competing organs of society
The Principles of Sociology, Volume 1, Part 2 [Inductions of Sociology], Chapters 5-8..
“Who now reads Spencer?” [These are the first 4 words of Talcott Parsons’s The Structure of Social Action (1937).] We do. And who now reads Parsons? We do, despite being less fun than Spencer. As Parsons read Weber, as Durkheim read Spencer, and as Luhmann read Parsons, Social Science Files reads the foundational five.
Please bear in mind I am concentrating on elements that draw out the distinctiveness of ‘primitive’ (in our language, ‘earlier’ or ‘simpler’) formations of society. We are not seeking explanations here of modern complexity or indeed of anything after a change from ‘headless’ to ‘headed’ (even this sequence is problematic).
I should also warn the reader that it becomes harder to separate (and exclude) the biological analogies the further you go with Vol 1 Part 2 because, throwing caution to the wind, they are interwoven in single sentences. We should remember that when writing Principles of Sociology Spencer had recently finished The Principles of Biology:
1851, Social Statics
1855, The Principles of Psychology
1862, First Principles
1864–1867, The Principles of Biology, 2 volumes
1868–74, Essays: Moral, Political and Speculative, 3 vols.
1873, The Study of Sociology
1879–93, The Principles of Ethics, 2 volumes
1884, The Man Versus the State
1897, The Principles of Sociology, 3 volumes (1876–96)
1904, An Autobiography, 2 volumes [he deserved it]
The Source for today’s exhibit is:
Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Sociology, Volume 1 (1874–75; enlarged 1876, 1885), Part 2, The Inductions of Sociology, London [multiple publishers]
CHAPTER V — SOCIAL FUNCTIONS
§ 234. Changes of structures cannot occur without changes of functions. Much that was said in the last chapter mighty therefore, be said here with substituted terms. Indeed, as in societies many changes of structure are more indicated by changes of function than directly seen, it may be said that these last have been already described by implication.
There are, however, certain functional traits not manifestly implied by traits of structure. To these a few pages must be devoted.
§ 235. If organization consists in such a construction of the whole that its parts can carry on mutually-dependent actions, then in proportion as organization is high there must go a dependence of each part upon the rest so great that separation is fatal; and conversely. This truth is equally well shown in the individual organism and in the social organism.
The lowest animal-aggregates are so constituted that each portion, similar to every other in appearance, carries on similar actions; and here spontaneous or artificial separation interferes scarcely at all with the life of either separated portion. … [briefly protoplasms, monads, polyps]
The like happens for the like reason with the lowest social aggregates. A headless wandering group of primitive men divides without any inconvenience. Each man, at once warrior, hunter, and maker of his own weapons, hut, etc., with a squaw who has in every case the like drudgeries to carry on, needs concert with his fellows only in war and to some extent in the chase; and, except for fighting, concert with half the tribe is as good as concert with the whole.
Even where the slight differentiation implied by chieftainship exists, little inconvenience results from voluntary or enforced separation. Either before or after a part of the tribe migrates, some man becomes head, and such … social life as is possible recommences.
With highly-organized aggregates … it is very different. …
Twisting off the head of a fowl is fatal. …
If in high societies the effect of mutilation is less than in high animals, still it is great. Middlesex separated from its surroundings would in a few days have all its social processes stopped by lack of supplies. Cut off the cotton-district from Liverpool and other ports, and there would come arrest of its industry followed by mortality of its people. Let a division be made between the coal-mining populations and adjacent populations which smelt metals or make broadcloth by machinery, and both, forthwith dying socially by arrest of their actions, would begin to die individually.
Though when a civilized society is so divided that part of it is left without a central controlling agency, it may presently evolve one; yet there is meanwhile much risk of dissolution, and before re-organization is efficient, a long period of disorder and weakness must be passed through.
So that the consensus of functions becomes closer as evolution advances. In low aggregates, both individual and social, the actions of the parts are but little dependent on one another; whereas in developed aggregates of both kinds, that combination of actions which constitutes the life of the whole, makes possible the component actions which constitute the lives of the parts.
§ 236. Another corollary, manifest a priori and proved a posteriori, must be named. Where parts are little differentiated, they can readily perform one another's functions; but where much differentiated they can perform one another's functions very imperfectly, or not at all. …
… The higher we rise in the scale of organization the less practicable do we find such exchanges. Still, to some extent, substitutions of functions remain possible in highly developed creatures. … If a cancer in the esophagus prevents swallowing, the arrested food, dilating the esophagus, forms a pouch in which imperfect digestion is set up. But these small abilities of the differentiated parts to discharge one another's duties, are not displayed where they have diverged more widely. …
… In social organisms, low and high, we find these relatively great and relatively small powers of substitution. Of course, where each member of the tribe repeats every other in his mode of life, there are no unlike functions to be exchanged; and where there has arisen only that small differentiation implied by the barter of weapons for other articles, between one member of the tribe skilled in weapon-making and others less skilled, the destruction of this specially-skilled member entails no great evil; since the rest can severally do for themselves that which he did for them, though not quite so well.
Even in settled societies of considerable sizes, we find the like holds to a great degree. Of the ancient Mexicans, Zurita says — “Every Indian knows all handicrafts which do not require great skill or delicate instruments”; and in Peru each man “was expected to be acquainted with the various handicrafts essential to domestic comfort”: the parts of the societies were so slightly differentiated in their occupations, that assumption of one another's occupations remained practicable.
But in societies like our own, specialized industrially and otherwise in high degrees, the actions of one part which fails in its function cannot be assumed by other parts. Even the relatively-unskilled farm labourers, were they to strike, would have their duties very inadequately performed by the urban population; and our iron manufactures would be stopped if their trained artisans, refusing to work, had to be replaced by peasants or hands from cotton-factories. Still less could the higher functions, legislative, judicial, etc., be effectually performed by coalminers and navvies.
Evidently the same reason for this contrast holds in the two cases. In proportion as the units forming any part of an individual organism are limited to one kind of action, as that of absorbing, or secreting, or contracting, or conveying an impulse, and become adapted to that action, they lose adaptation to other actions; and in the social organism the discipline required for effectually discharging a special duty, causes unfitness for discharging special duties widely unlike it.
§ 237. Beyond these two chief functional analogies between individual organisms and social organisms, that when they are little evolved, division or mutilation causes small inconvenience, but when they are much evolved it causes great perturbation or death, and that in low types of either kind the parts can assume one another's functions, but cannot in high types; sundry consequent functional analogies might be enlarged on did space permit.
There is the truth that in both kinds of organisms the vitality increases as fast as the functions become specialized. In either case, before there exist structures severally adapted for the unlike actions, these are ill-performed; and in the absence of developed appliances for furthering it, the utilization of one another's services is but slight.
But along with advance of organization, every part, more limited in its office, performs its office better; the means of exchanging benefits become greater; each aids all, and all aid each with increasing efficiency; and the total activity we call life, individual or national, augments.
Much, too, remains to be said about the parallelism between the changes by which the functions become specialized; but this, along with other parallelisms, will best be seen on following out, as we will now do, the evolution of the several great systems … individual and social: considering their respective structural and functional traits together.
CHAPTER VI — SYSTEMS OF ORGANS
§ 237 The hypothesis of evolution implies a truth which was established independently of it — the truth that all animals, however unlike they finally become, begin their developments in like ways. The first structural changes, once passed through in common by divergent types, are repeated in the early changes undergone by every new individual of each type. Admitting some exceptions, chiefly among parasites, this is recognized as a general law.
This common method of development among individual organisms, we may expect to find paralleled by some common method among social organisms; and our expectation will be verified. …
… Early stages which are in principle analogous, occur in the evolution of social organisms. When from low tribes entirely undifferentiated, we pass to tribes next above them, we find classes of masters and slaves — masters who, as warriors carry on the offensive and defensive activities and thus especially stand in relations to environing agencies; and slaves who carry on inner activities for the general sustentation, primarily of their masters and secondarily of themselves.
Of course this contrast is at first vague. Where the tribe subsists mainly on wild animals, its dominant men, being hunters as well as warriors, take a large share in procuring food; and such few captives as are made by war, become men who discharge the less skilled and more laborious parts of the process of sustentation.
But along with establishment of the agricultural state, the differentiation grows more appreciable. Though members of the dominant class, superintending the labour of their slaves in the fields, sometimes join in it; yet the subject-class is habitually the one immediately in contact with the food-supply, and the dominant class, more remote from the food-supply, is becoming directive only, with respect to internal actions, while it is both executive and directive with respect to external actions, offensive and defensive.
A society thus composed of two strata in contact, complicates by the rise of grades within each stratum. For small tribes the structure just described suffices; but where there are formed aggregates of tribes, necessarily having more-developed governmental and militant agencies, with accompanying more-developed industrial agencies supporting them, the higher and lower strata severally begin to differentiate internally.
The superior class, besides minor distinctions which arise locally, originates everywhere a supplementary class of personal adherents who are mostly also warriors; while the inferior class begins to separate into bond and free. Various of the Malayo-Polynesian societies show us this stage. Among the East Africans … we find the same general sub-division — the king with his relatives, the class of chiefs, the common people, the slaves; of which the first two with their immediate dependents carry on the corporate actions of the society, and the second two those actions of a relatively-separate order which yield it all the necessaries of life. …
§ 239. In both individual and social organisms, after the outer and inner systems have been marked off from one another, there begins to arise a third system, lying between the two and facilitating their co-operation. Mutual dependence of the primarily-contrasted parts, implies intermediation; and in proportion as they develop, the apparatus for exchanging products and influences must develop too. This we find it does. … [brief biological]
… Evidently [a] distributing system must arise between the two pre-existing systems; and it necessarily ramifies in proportion as the parts to which it carries materials become more remote, more numerous, and severally more complex.
The like happens in societies. The lowest types have no distributing systems — no roads or traders exist. The two original classes are in contact. Any slaves possessed by a member of the dominant class, stand in such direct relation to him that the transfer of products takes place without intervening persons; and each family being self-sufficing, there need no agents through whom to effect exchanges of products between families.
Even after these two primary divisions become partially subdivided, we find that so long as the social aggregate is a congeries of tribes severally carrying on within themselves the needful productive activities, a distributing system is scarcely traceable: occasional assemblings for barter alone occur. But as fast as consolidation of such tribes makes possible the localization of industries, there begins to show itself an appliance for transferring commodities; consisting now of single hawkers, now of traveling companies of traders, and growing with the formation of roads into an organized system of wholesale and retail distribution which spreads everywhere.
§ 240. There are, then, parallelisms between these three great systems in the two kinds of organisms [individual and social]. Moreover, they arise in the social organism in the same order as in the individual organism; and for the same reasons.
A society lives by appropriating matters from the earth — the mineral matters used for buildings, fuel, etc., the vegetal matters raised on its surface for food and clothing, the animal matters elaborated from these with or without human regulation; and the lowest social stratum is the one through which such matters are taken up and delivered to agents who pass them into the general current of commodities: the higher part of this lowest stratum being that which, in workshops and factories, elaborates some of these materials before they go to consumers.
Clearly, then, the classes engaged in manual occupations play the same part in the function of social sustentation, as is played by the components of the alimentary organs in the sustentation of a living body. No less certain is it that the entire class of men engaged in buying and selling commodities of all kinds, on large and small scales, and in sending them along gradually-formed channels to all districts, towns, and individuals, so enabling them to make good the waste caused by action, is, along with those channels, fulfilling an office essentially like that fulfilled in a living body by the vascular system; which, to every structure and every unit of it, brings a current of nutritive matters proportionate to its activity. And it is equally manifest that while in the living body, the brain, the organs of sense, and the limbs guided by them, distant in position from the alimentary surfaces, are fed through the tortuous channels of the vascular system; so the controlling parts of a society, most remote from the operative parts, have brought to them through courses of distribution often extremely indirect, the needful supplies of consumable articles.
That the order of evolution is necessarily the same [in individual and social life] is just as clear … in proportion as the outer structures, becoming more active, expend more, simple absorption from adjacent tissues no longer meets the resulting waste; and in proportion as the mass becomes larger, and the parts which prepare nutriment consequently more remote from the parts which consume it, there arises the need for a means of transfer.
Until the two original systems have been marked off from one another, this tertiary system has no function; and when the two original systems arise, they cannot develop far without corresponding development of this tertiary system. In the evolution of the social organism we see the like.
Where there exist only a class of masters and a class of slaves, in direct contact, an appliance for transferring products has no place; but a larger society having classes exercising various regulative functions, and localities devoted to different industries, not only affords a place for a transferring system, but can grow and complicate only on condition that this transferring system makes proportionate advances.
And now, having observed the relations among these three great systems, we may trace out the evolution of each by itself.
CHAPTER VII — THE SUSTAINING SYSTEM
§ 241. The parts carrying on alimentation in a living body and the parts carrying on productive industries in the body politic, constitute, in either case, a sustaining system: sustentation is the office they have in common. These parts are differentiated in conformity with certain laws which are common to individual organisms and social organisms; and of these laws the most general is that which concerns localization of their divisions. …
… In the social organism localization of the various industries which jointly sustain the whole, is determined in an analogous manner.
Primarily, the relations to different parts of the organic and inorganic environments, usually not alike over the whole area the society covers, initiate differences in the occupations carried on. And, secondarily, the nearness to districts which have had their industries thus fixed, fixes the positions of other industries which especially require their products.
The first of these localizations is traceable even among the semi-civilized. Jackson describes some of the Fiji Islands as famous for wooden implements, others for mats and baskets, others for pots and pigments — unlikenesses between the natural products of the islands being the causes; as also in Samoa, where Turner says net-making is “confined principally to the inland villages”, and ascribes this to “proximity to the raw material”. The slightly-advanced societies of Africa show us kindred differentiations, having kindred origins. In Loango, “the sea-coasts are frequented by regular professed fishermen”, and there are also men who live near the sea and make salt by “evaporating sea-water over a fire”. Here local facilities manifestly fix these occupations; as they doubtless do in that Ashantee town which is devoted to pottery. The extinct societies of America had more numerous such instances. Lorenzana says — “An extensive commerce is carried on in this salt [saltpetre] by the Mexicans of Yxtapaluca and Yxtapalapa, which mean the places where salt, or Yxtatl, is gathered”; and when we read in Clavigero of the potters of Cholula, the stone-cutters of Tenajocan, the fishers of Cuitlahuac, and the florists of Xochimilco, we cannot doubt that these several businesses grew up in places which respectively furnished natural advantages for carrying them on. So of the Ancient Peruvians we are told that “the shoes were made in the provinces where aloes were most abundant, for they were made of the leaves of a tree called maguey. The arms also were supplied by the provinces where the materials for making them were most abundant”.
By showing us the generality of the law, these instances give point to the evidence around us. Familiarity must not make us overlook the meaning of the facts that the population fringing our shores is, by virtue of its position, led into occupations directly or indirectly maritime — fishing, sailing ship-building — while certain coast-towns are, by physical circumstances, differentiated into places of import and export; and that the inland population, mostly raising this or that kind of food as soil and climate determine, has its energies otherwise turned by proximity to the raw material, here to quarrying stone or slate, here to brick-making, and in other places raising minerals.
Then, as above implied, there result the secondary localizations favoured by these. Where not drawn by natural advantages in the way of water-power, manufactures in general cluster in or around regions where abundance of coal makes steam-power cheap. And if two materials are needed, the localization is determined by them jointly; as with the nail-making industry at Stourbridge, where both iron and coal are close at hand; as in Birmingham, with its multifarious hardwares, which is similarly adjacent to the sources of these two chief raw materials; as in Manchester, which lies near the chief cotton port and on a coal region; as in Sheffield, which, besides the five streams yielding its water-power, and its adjacency to supplies of iron, coal, and charcoal, has at hand “the best grit in the world for grindstones”.
§ 242. This localization of organs devoted to the preparation of those matters which the organism, individual or social, needs for sustentation, exhibits a further common trait.
With the industrial structures which arise in a large society formed by permanent consolidation of small societies, the like happens: they extend themselves without reference to political divisions, great or little. We have around us a sufficiency of illustrations. Just noting the partial differentiations of the agricultural system, here characterized by predominance of cereal produce, here by the raising of cattle, and in mountainous parts by sheep-farming — differences which have no reference to county-boundaries — we may note more especially how the areas devoted to this or that manufacture, are wholly unrelated to the original limits of political groups, and to whatever limits were politically established afterwards. We have an iron-secreting district occupying part of Worcestershire, part of Staffordshire, part of Warwickshire. The cotton manufacture is not restricted to Lancashire, but takes in a northern district of Derbyshire. And in the coal and iron region round Newcastle and Durham it is the same.
So, too, of the smaller political divisions and the smaller parts of our industrial structures. A manufacturing town grows without regard to parish-boundaries; which are, indeed, often traversed by the premises of single establishments. On a larger scale the like is shown us by our great city. London overruns many parishes; and its increase is not checked by the division between Middlesex and Surrey.
Occasionally it is observable that even national boundaries fail to prevent this consequence of industrial localization: instance the fact named by Hallam, that “the woollen manufacture spread from Flanders along the banks of the Rhine, and into the northern provinces of France”.
Meanwhile the controlling structures, however much they change their proportions, do not thus lose their relations to the original segments. The regulating agencies of our countries continue to represent what were once independent governments.
In the old English period the county was an area ruled by a comes or earl. According to Stubbs, “the constitutional machinery of the shire thus represents either the national organization of the several divisions created by West Saxon conquests; or that of the early settlements which united in the Mercian kingdom as it advanced westwards; or the re-arrangement by the West Saxon dynasty of the whole of England on the principles already at work in its own shires”. Similarly respecting the eighty small Gaulish states which originally occupied the area of France, M. Fustel de Coulanges says — “Ni les Romains ni les Germains, ni la féodalité ni la monarchie n'ont détruit ces unités vivaces”; which up to the time of the Revolution remained substantially, as “provinces” and “pays”, the minor local governments.
§ 243. This community of traits between the developments of sustaining structures in an individual organism and in a social organism, requires to be expressed apart from detail before its full meaning can be seen. …
And what, stated in terms similarly general, is the course of evolution in the industrial system of a society? That as a whole it takes on activities and correlative structures, determined by the minerals, animals, and vegetals, with which its workers are in contact; and that industrial specializations in parts of its population, are determined by differences, organic or inorganic, in the local products those parts have to deal with.
The truth that while the material environment, yielding in various degrees and with various advantages consumable things, thus determines the industrial differentiations, I have, in passing, joined with a brief indication of the truth that differentiations of the regulative or governmental structures are not thus determined. The significance of this antithesis remains to be pointed out when the evolution of these governmental structures is traced.
CHAPTER VIII — THE DISTRIBUTING SYSTEM
§ 244. In the last chapter but one, where the relations between the three great systems of organs were described, it was pointed out that neither in an animal nor in a society can development of the sustaining system or of the regulating system go on without concomitant development of the distributing system.
Transition from a partially-coherent group of tribes which are severally self-sufficing, to a completely-coherent group in which industrial differences have arisen, cannot take place without the rise of an agency for transferring commodities … A mediaeval society formed of slightly-subordinated feudal states, each having besides its local lord its several kinds of workers and traders within itself, just as an annelid is formed of segments, each having besides its ganglia its own appendages, brachiæ, and simply alimentary tract; can no more pass into an integrated society having localized industries, without the development of roads and commercial classes, than the annelid can evolve into a crustacean or insect, characterized by many unlikenesses of parts and actions, without the growth of a vascular system. Here, then, we have to observe the implied parallelisms between the distributing systems, individual and social, in their successive stages. …
… So is it with low societies. Tribes that are small, migratory, and without division of labour, by each of these characters negative the formation of channels for intercourse. A group of a dozen or two, have among themselves such small and indefinite communications as scarcely to make tracks between huts; when migratory, as they mostly are, the beaten paths they begin forming at each temporary abode are soon overgrown ; and even where they are settled, if they are scattered and have no unlikenesses of occupations, the movements of individuals from place to place are so trifling as to leave but faint traces. …
… With societies, as with living bodies, channels of communication are produced by the movements which they afterwards facilitate: each transit making subsequent transits easier. Sometimes lines opened by animals are followed; as by the Nagas, who use the tracks made through the jungle by wild beasts. Similarly caused, the early paths of men are scarcely better than these. The roads of the Bechuanas are “with difficulty to be distinguished from those made by the quaghas and antelopes”. Throughout Eastern Africa “the most frequented routes are foot-tracks like goat-walks”. And in Abyssinia, a high road “is only a track worn by use, and a little larger than the sheep-paths, from the fact of more feet passing over it”.
Even with such social growth as produces towns carrying on much intercourse, there is at first nothing more than an undesigned production of a less resistant channel by force of much passing. Describing the road between the old and new capitals of the Bechuanas, Burchell says — “This consists of a number of footpaths wide enough only for a single person, and running either parallel to each other, or crossing very obliquely. I counted from twelve to about eighteen or twenty of these paths, within the breadth of a few yards.” …
… The like happens with channels of communication through the social organism: indefinite lacunœ, as we see that they are all at the outset, first acquire definite boundaries in the parts where there is most traffic. Of East African roads, which are commonly like goat-walks, Burton says that “where fields and villages abound they are closed with rough hedges, horizontal tree-trunks, and even rude stockades, to prevent trespassing and pilferage”. So, too, in Dahomey [Dahomé], though the roads are mostly footpaths, yet “the roads to the coast, except in a few places, are good enough for wheeled vehicles” while “the road, six or seven miles long, separating the two capitals, may compare with the broadest in England”. And from the capital of Ashantee, described as having broad, clean streets, there radiate towards distant parts of the territory eight pathways, cut by successive kings through the forest — doubtless replacing the primitive paths made by traffic.
Ignoring Roman roads, which were not produced by local evolution, we may trace in our own history this centrifugal development of channels of communication.
The paving of the central parts of London did not begin till after the eleventh century; and, having got as far outwards as Holborn at the beginning of the fifteenth century, it spread into some of the suburbs during the sixteenth century. In Henry Vlllth's reign a way, when too deep and miry to be traversed, was “merely abandoned and a new track selected”. [history of roads] … Then macadamization, an improvement belonging to our own century, beginning with main lines of communication, gradually extended itself first to all turnpike roads, then to parish roads, and finally to private roads.
Further analogies may be indicated. With increased pressure of traffic has come, in addition to the road, the railway; which, in place of a single channel for movement in both directions, habitually has a double channel — up-line and down-line — analogous to the double set of tubes through which, in a superior animal, blood proceeds from the centre and towards the centre. As in the finished vascular system the great blood-vessels are the most direct, the divergent secondary ones less direct, the branches from these more crooked still, and the capillaries the most tortuous of all; so we see that these chief lines of transit through a society are the straightest, high roads less straight, parish roads more devious, and so on down to cart-tracks through fields.
One more strange parallel exists. In considerably-developed animals, as many Mollusca, though the vascular system is so far complete in its central parts that the arteries have muscular coats, and are lined with “pavement epithelium”, it remains incomplete at its peripheral parts: the small blood-vessels terminate in lacunœ of the primitive kind.
Similarly in the developed distributing system of a society, while the main channels are definitely bounded and have surfaces fitted for bearing the wear and tear of great traffic, the divergent channels carrying less traffic are less highly structured; and the redivergent ones, becoming less finished as they ramify, everywhere end in lacunœ — unfenced, unmetalled tracks for cart, horse, or pedestrian, through field or wood, over moor and mountain.
Notice must also be taken of the significant fact that in proportion as organisms, individual and social, develop largely the appliances for conflict with other organisms, these channels of distribution arise not for internal sustentation only, but partly, and often mainly, for transferring materials from the sustaining parts to the expending parts.
As in an animal with a large nervo-muscular system, arteries are formed more for carrying blood from the viscera to the brain and limbs than for carrying blood from one viscus to another; so in a kingdom with activities predominantly militant, the chief roads are those made for purposes of offence and defence. The consumption of men and supplies in war, makes more necessary than all others the roads which take them; and they are the first to assume definiteness.
We see this in the above-named royal roads in Ashantee; again in the ancient Peruvian royal roads for conveying troops; and we are reminded of the relation in the empire of the Romans, between finished roads and military activity at remote points. The principle, however, remains the same: be it in the commercial railways of England or the military railways of Russia, the channels arise between places of supply and places of demand, though the consumption may be here in peace and there in war.
§ 246. … Devoid of canals for distribution, animals of low types show us nothing but an extremely slow, as well as irregular, diffusion through the tissues; and so in primitive societies, where nothing beyond a small amount of barter goes on, the exchanged products are dispersed very gradually and in indefinite ways: the movements are feeble, and do not constitute anything like circulation! …
… [This] is analogous to the first movements of distribution in developing societies. We do not begin with constant currents in the same directions; but we begin with periodical currents, now directed to certain spots and then away from them. That which, when established, we know as a fair, is the commercial wave in its first form. We find it in slightly-advanced societies. The Sandwich Islanders met on the Wairuku river at stated times to exchange their products; and the Fijians of different islands, assembled occasionally at a fixed place for barter.
Of course, with the increase of population the streams of people and commodities which set at intervals to and from certain places, become more frequent. The semi-civilized African kingdoms show us stages. On the Lower Niger, “every town has a market generally once in four days”, and at different parts of the river a large fair about once a fortnight. In other cases, as at Sansanding, besides some daily sale there was a great market once a week, to which crowds from the surrounding country came. And then in the largest places, such as Timbuctoo, constant distribution has replaced periodic distribution.
So, too, in the Batta territory, Sumatra, there are assemblings for traffic every fourth day; and in Madagascar, besides the daily market in the capital, there are markets at longer intervals in the provincial towns. Ancient American societies displayed this stage passing into a higher. Among the Chibchas, along with constant traffic, the greatest traffic was at eight-day intervals; and Mexico, besides daily markets, had larger markets every five days, which, in adjacent cities, were at different dates: there being meanwhile merchants who, Sabagun says, “go through the whole country ... buying in one district and selling in others” — so fore-shadowing developed system.
Clearly these occasional assembling and dispersings, shortening their intervals until they reach a daily bringing of products by some and buying by others, thus grow into a regular series of frequent waves, transfering things from places of supply to places of demand. Our own history shows how such slow periodic repletions and depletions, now in this locality and now in that, pass gradually into a rapid circulation. In early English times the great fairs, annual and other, formed the chief means of distribution, and remained important down to the seventeenth century, when not only villages but even small towns, devoid of shops, were irregularly supplied by hawkers who had obtained their stocks at these gatherings.
Along with increased population, larger industrial centres, and improved channels of communication, local supply became easier; and so, frequent markets more and more fulfilled the purpose of infrequent fairs. Afterwards in chief places and for chief commodities, markets themselves multiplied; becoming in some cases daily. Finally came a constant distribution such that of some foods there is to each town an influx every morning; and of milk even more than one in the day. The transitions from times when the movements of people and goods between places were private, slow, and infrequent, to times when there began to run at intervals of several days public vehicles moving at four miles an hour, and then to times when these shortened their intervals and increased their speed while their lines of movement multiplied, ending in our own times when along each line of rails there go at high speed a dozen waves daily that are relatively vast; sufficiently show us how the social circulation progresses from feeble, slow, irregular movements to a rapid, regular, and powerful pulse.
§ 247. If from the channels of communication and the movements along them, we turn to the circulating currents themselves, and consider their natures and their relations to the parts, we still meet with [biological and “rude digestion”] analogies. …
… If, in like manner, with the currents in a low society, we contrast the currents in an advanced society, we see that here, too, the greater heterogeneity is mainly caused by the many kinds of manufactured articles fitted for consumption; and though certain waste products of social life do not return into the circulating currents, but are carried off by under-ground channels, yet other waste products are carried off along those ordinary channels of circulation which bring materials for consumption.
Next we have to note the special actions which the local structures exert on the general current of commodities. While in a living body the organs severally take from the blood everywhere carried through them, the materials needed for their sustentation, those which are occupied in excretion and secretion also severally take from the blood particular ingredients, which they either cast out or compound. A salivary gland forms from the matters it appropriates, a liquid which changes starch into sugar and by doing this aids the subsequent preparation of food; the gastric follicles elaborate and pour out acids, etc., which help to dissolve the contents of the stomach; the liver, separating certain waste products from the blood, throws them into the intestine as bile, along with that glycogen it forms from other components which is to be re-absorbed; and the units of these several organs live, grow, and multiply, by carrying on their several businesses.
So is it with social organs. While all of them, under restrictions to be hereafter specified, absorb from the distributed supply of commodities shares needful for their sustentation, such of them as carry on manufactures, large or small, also select from the heterogeneous streams of things that run everywhere, the materials which they transform; and afterwards return into these streams the elaborated products.
Ignoring for the moment the familiar aspect of sale and purchase, under which these transactions present themselves to us, and contemplating simply the physical process, we see that each industrial structure, allowing various materials to pass through its streets untouched, takes out of the mixed current those it is fitted to act upon; and throws into the circulating stock of things, the articles it has prepared for general consumption.
The fact that competition is common to the two cases must also be observed. Though commonly thought of as a phenomenon exclusively social, competition exists in a living body — not so obviously between parts that carry on the same function, as between parts that carry on different functions. The general stock of nutriment circulating through an organism has to support the whole. Each organ appropriates a portion of this general stock for repair and growth. Whatever each takes diminishes by so much the amount available for the rest. All other organs therefore, jointly and individually, compete for blood with each organ.
So that though the welfare of each is indirectly bound up with that of the rest; yet, directly, each is antagonistic to the rest. Hence it happens that extreme cerebral action so drafts away the blood as to stop digestion; that, conversely, the visceral demand for blood after a heavy meal often so drains the brain as to cause sleep; and that extremely violent exertion, carrying an excessive amount of blood to the motor organs, may arrest digestion, or diminish thought and feeling, or both.
While these facts prove that there is competition, they also prove that the exalted function of a part caused by demands made on it, determines the flow of blood to it. Though, as we shall hereafter see, there is in the higher organisms a kind of regulation which secures a more prompt balancing of supplies and demands under this competitive arrangement, yet, primarily, the balancing results from the setting of blood towards parts in proportion to their activities.
Morbid growths, which not only draw to themselves much blood but develop in themselves vascular structures to distribute it, show us how local tissue-formation (which under normal conditions measures the waste of tissue in discharging function) is itself a cause of increased supply of materials.
Now we have daily proof that in a society, not only individuals but classes, local and general, severally appropriate from the total stock of commodities as much as they can; and that their several abilities to appropriate, normally depend on their several states of activity. If less iron is wanted for export or home consumption, furnaces are blown out, men are discharged, and there flows towards the district a diminished stream of the things required for nutrition: causing arrest of growth and, if continued, even decay. When a cotton famine entails greater need for woollens, the increased activity of the factories producing them, while it leads to the drawing in of more raw material and sending out of more manufactured goods, determines towards the cloth districts augmented supplies of all kinds — men, money, consumable commodities; and there results enlargement of old factories and building of new ones.
Evidently this process in each social organ, as in each individual organ, results from the tendency of the units to absorb all they can from the common stock of materials for sustentation; and evidently the resulting competition, not between units simply but between organs, causes in a society, as in a living body, high, nutrition and growth of parts called into greatest activity by the requirements of the rest. …
§ 248. Of course, along with these likenesses there go differences, due to the contrast named at the outset between the concreteness of an individual organism and the discreteness of a social organism. I may name, first, a difference which accompanies the likeness last dwelt upon.
If the persons forming a body-politic were mostly fixed in their positions, as are the units forming an individual body, the feeding of them would have to be similarly effected. Their respective shares of nutriment, not simply brought to their neighbourhood, would have to be taken home to them. A process such as that by which certain kinds of food are daily carried round to houses by a class of locomotive units, would be the universal process.
But as members of the body politic, though having stationary habitations and working places, are themselves locomotive, it results that the process of distribution is effected partly in this way and partly by their own agency.
Further, there results from the same general cause, a difference between the ways in which motion is given to the circulating currents in the two cases. Physical cohesion of the parts in an individual living body, makes possible the propulsion of the nutritive liquid by a contractile organ; but lacking this physical cohesion, and lacking too the required metamorphosis of units, the body-politic cannot have its currents of commodities thus moved: though remotely produced by other forces, their motion has to be proximately produced by forces within the currents themselves.
After recognizing these unlikenesses, however, we see that they do but qualify the essential likenesses. In both cases so long as there is little or no differentiation of parts there is little or no need for channels of communication among the parts; and even a differentiation, when such only that the unlike parts remain in close contact, does not demand appliances for transfer.
But when the division of labour, physiological or sociological, has so far progressed that parts at some distance from one another co-operate, the growth of channels of distribution, with agents effecting distribution, becomes necessary; and the development of the distributing system has to keep pace with the other developments.
A like necessity implies a like parallelism between the progressing circulations in the two cases. Feeble activities, small amounts of exchange, obstacles to transfer, unite in preventing at first anything more than very slow and irregular repletions and depletions, now at one place now at another; but with multiplication of parts increasingly specialized in their functions, increasingly efficient therefore, and combining to produce an increased amount of general life, there goes an increased need for large distributions in constant directions. Irregular, weak, and slow movements at long intervals, are changed into a regular rapid rhythm by strong and unceasing local demands.
Yet more. With the advance of the aggregate, individual or social, to a greater heterogeneity, there goes advancing heterogeneity in the circulating currents; which at first containing few crude matters, contain at last many prepared matters. In both cases, too, structures which elaborate the requisites for sustentation, stand to these currents in like relations — take from them the raw materials on which they have to operate, and directly or indirectly deliver into them again the products; and in both cases these structures, competing with one another for their shares of the circulating stock of consumable matters, are enabled to appropriate, to repair themselves, and to grow, in proportion to their performances of functions.
Stated most generally, the truth we have to carry with us is that the distributing system in the social organism, as in the individual organism, has its development determined by the necessities of transfer among inter-dependent parts. Lying between the two original systems, which carry on respectively the outer dealings with surrounding existences, and the inner dealings with materials required for sustentation, its structure becomes adapted to the requirements of this carrying function between the two great systems as wholes, and between the sub-divisions of each.
[You have now reached the end of this Social Science Files exhibit.]
Social Science Files collects and displays multidisciplinary writings on a great variety of topics relating to evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.
The Heller Files’, quality tools for Social Science.