United States or Cambodia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Of course these are the two extremes; fortunately human nature is not what the sociologists and political theorists would make it. The political boss is not the unscrupulous ogre that the muck-rakers picture. He does not order the judge to decide the hundred-thousand-dollar-contract case in favor of his hench man. He might like to have him do so but he does not ask.
The primary task may be to secure a better adjustment of the economic interests of employer and employee through an improvement of the wage system, but in the larger sense the industrial problem is a social and moral one. Sociologists reckon among the social forces a distinction between elemental desires and broader interests.
The good name of the Republic depends upon its putting into practice every democratic principle; and democratic principles have certainly never been more precisely realised than in the preceding example, which I have had great pleasure in rescuing from oblivion and presenting to the notice of sociologists. I have already compared this, our desire to worship incompetence, to an infectious disease.
It seems safe to assume that the people were better acquainted with their own condition than the sociologists, and it is certain that it was the growing conviction of the American masses during the closing decades of the nineteenth century that they were losing ground economically and in danger of sinking into the degraded condition of the proletariat and peasantry of the ancient and contemporary European world.
But the generalizations which have been massed by non-Christian anthropologists and sociologists are often gleaned and culled under the strongest subserviency to some favorite hypothesis, and that on the most superficial observation and from the most unreliable authorities.
Much of the actual lobbying necessary has been done by the girls themselves, and they have exercised a power out of all proportion to their numbers or the tiny treasury at their disposal. No arguments of sociologists were half so convincing to legislators or so enlightening to the public as those of the girls who had themselves been through the mill.
This may be defined, not very accurately, as the power of making believe, a factor which sociologists have scarcely appreciated as yet. We have such popular expressions as 'making a virtue of necessity, which indicates that there is a certain popular appreciation of the real significance of this power, but we have very little in the way of a scientific appreciation of it.
While this course of reasoning may seem rational and the conclusion may seem tenable, it is well known to physiologists and sociologists that the reasoning is fallacious; the fallacy rests in the premises. It was assumed above that the activity of the sexual glands was comparable with that of muscles.
Let us take, for example, the way in which Herbert Spencer illustrates the general theorem of the evolutionary sociologists by the case of Shakespeare, and Shakespeare's debt to his times.
The innocent reader is skilfully to be guided into the advertiser's paradise. We claimed that here the economic innovation, whether profitable or not, has its cultural significance. The sociologists who have thought seriously about the American type of civilization have practically agreed in the conviction that the shortcoming of the American mind lies in its lack of desire for harmony and unity.
Word Of The Day