The Idea of Process in American Social Thought

Abstract

THE sciences which are in any peculiar sense modern, said Thorstein Veblen in 1908, take as an (unavowed) postulate the fact of consecutive change.... This notion of process about which the researches of modern science cluster, is a notion of a sequence, or complex, of consecutive change in which the nexus of the sequence . . . is the relation of cause and effect. The consecution, moreover, runs in terms of persistence of quantity or of force.1 John Dewey has urged the same point: Since the idea of history involves cumulative continuity of movement in a given direction toward stated outcomes, the fundamental conception that controls determination of subject-matter as historical is that of a direction of movement.2 And again: In science the order of fixities has already passed irretrievably into an order of connections in process.3 The first part of this paper will discuss the ideas of social process advanced by six recent American thinkers: Dewey, Veblen, Wesley C. Mitchell, John R. Commons, Theodore Dreiser, and Clarence Darrow. Then three related criticisms are made of the idea as it was formulated and applied by these men. The final section suggests the relevance