The "Social Forces" Error

Abstract

At the World's Congress of Arts and Sciences which was held at St. Louis in I904, I ventured to enter a protest against the loose way in which the word is employed by sociologists, saying among other things that sociologists have no more occasion to refer to any than the biologists have to speak of a vital There is a concept of force in general, to which I raise no objection, and there is a concept of social forces in particular, which is the object of my criticism. The former is the general metaphysical concept of power. In this sense according to prevalent modern philosophy there is but One Force which underlies and continuously causes all things that do appear, and is operative in the swinging of the spheres, in the bubbling of gases, and in the chemistry of growth in every grass blade. According to the theory of evolution the operation of The Force appeared first in the simplest phenomena, not however absolutely without differences among themselves. These simple phenomena became the conditions of other phenomena which, being added to the first, made a more complex situation and afforded the conditions for still other manifestations, or as we say, other phenomena, every new kind of phenomena being added to those which had preceded to form the conditions of still higher manifestations of the One Power. Scientific explanation is the description of the situation out of which a new kind of phenomena emerges a statement of those conditions which are the necessary logical antecedents of the phenomena explained. Now as often as we come across a kind of phenomena the conditioning of which we do not understand, we are tempted to say it is caused by a force. It is indeed caused by The Force